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)
When it comes to AI, I’m seeing a variety of different hype levels. As far as consumer products are concerned, it’s mostly just hype and vapor—a solution looking for a problem. However, on the B2B side, it can be a lot more grounded. Recently, I’ve been talking a a few AI companies, and they aren’t promising completely absurd things. Most of them know exactly how hard it can be to implement AI and squeeze some benefit out of it. IBM guys were the only ones who were still hyping it hard. Everyone else seems to have their feet on the ground. Those IBM guys were all like: “Just dump all of your data on the model, and it will work things out”. Yeah, sure… With those references, we’re not starting an expensive project just to see if it’s true.
Vaporware turns out to be vapor. Shocking.
trackerware corporations couldn’t maintain their monetization stranglehold
AI became the new buzzword
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.
The money behind the hype went into “AI” instead
I’ve also heard the theory before that even GPUs went pretty much straight from mining cryptocurrencies to then be used for training LLM models.
AI is the new crypto, crypto still here but its largely used by shady people and conservatives love to invest in a scam, because they play it like its stock, but its easier to understand and less convoluted than a stock, buys, puts,whatever. the threat of CRYPTO has largely faded into background.
Not an expert, but IMO, it’s because it was misused. Cryptocurrency is just one application of blockchain technology, but people equated blockchain to crypto, and crypto was turned into an investment scheme instead of an actual currency. Then came NFTs, which people turned into rugpull scams. And news of the volatility of cryptocurrency and all those NFT scams drove away any chance of regular people adopting anything blockchain-related.
misused
Give me an example of a real world problem that was either unsolved before blockchain solved it, or blockchain solves it better than existing alternatives.
I’ll go ahead and save you “decentralized currency/finance between untrustworthy entities” (i.e. cryptocurrency) because it doesn’t actually (and can’t actually) solve that in the real world. Humans are too error-prone, and an immutable ledger presents too high a risk for business-ending mistakes for any business with any alternative options to adopt it for their primary revenue pathway.
Give me an example of a real world problem that was either unsolved before blockchain solved it, or blockchain solves it better than existing alternatives.
International online payment without a company telling you that your legal adult entertainment is morally wrong
Did blockchain solve it? Is blockchain actually pragmatically solving that problem better than existing alternatives? Or is the cost of adopting a blockchain payment system as the primary payment system, with all the risks inherent in it, higher than the benefits when compared to alternatives?
No alternatives existed or exist. You asked for a use case
Would be great if it did, but it doesn’t. I’m also not talking about using it as a primary payment system
I’ll give you a couple examples of use cases for Blockchain technology that no other technology solves.
As currency:
- Payment system without content restrictions. You might say “But MasterCard said they’re not blocking it”, but they could, they could pressure Valve into removing other games, or something similar. Such a thing is impossible in Blockchain, there’s no single owner that can impose limits to what you can/can’t buy with it.
- International transactions without restrictions. We talked about how payment processors can stop transactions, banks and governments can do the same and while they use this power less often it’s still generally a pain in the ass to move money from one country to another.
As smart contracts:
- International car ownership deeds. In most countries car ownership has to be registered into the DMV equivalent, this means that moving a car from one country to another is problematic. A smart contract ledger would be an excellent solution to this, countries could use the ledger to transfer ownership and that transfer would be understood by any country that already uses the same ledger as a source of truth, without any of the countries having to trust in the systems built by the other countries.
- Something similar for phones could also include known stolen IMEI numbers that can be blocked internationally without any regulatory organization needing to trust one another or rely in a centralized controlling agency.
i’ll give it a crack
in australia, we have various credentials provided by the government to attest to a persons fitness to work with children (i’ll just refer to these in bulk from now on as WWCC: working with children checks). there are many of these - one per state for individuals, plus teacher’s accreditations per state, and a few more. they’re ongoing certifications, so can be revoked if anything happens
it’s a legal requirement for businesses who engage in activities involving kids to ensure anyone they employ - including volunteers - is appropriately vetted
needless to say, this gets quite complex for national organisations!
i was the engineering lead for a startup that organisations could add their workforce into the system, with the credentials, and the system checked periodically to check that everyone’s credentials are valid, about to expire, etc and notify people if something goes awry
of course, that doesn’t need blockchain BUT
in cases of child sexual abuse, things tend to only come out after 30+ years on average (according to the royal commission into institutional responses to child sexual abuse). organisations need to be able to prove that they were doing everything they possibly could to protect the kids under their care. 30 years on that’s no small task! our company might not even exist in 30 years!
along with our automated checks, we also published an event to the eth blockchain: a hash of the card details as an index (ie if you know the card details, you can look up all instances of validation), and a hash that proves the check took place
what’s that hash? well, i won’t get too into the weeds but essentially we push a payload to IPFS which contains:
- a link to a kind of “template” of an HTTP archive for a typical request to the validation service
- a diff that allows you to reconstruct the HTTP archive of this instance of the request given the original template
- various pieces of the HTTPS handshake with the validation service that allow you to essentially validate after the fact that the content of the HTTP archive was exactly what the validation service sent at the time - HTTPS is essentially signed information after all, so we have a chunk of HTML attesting to the validity of a card that’s been signed by the government! cryptographic proof - not just “take my word for it”
we also published a page on IPFS that allows people to enter card details and load all this information and produce all the technical details to prove what happened (we also had plans for some kind of hardware pack with pinned versions of things because browsers and technology change)
you might be able to do this by relying on the date header that the server sends, but to be really sure, writing the hashes to the blockchain proves that the event given happened at a very specific time and date
blockchain shouldn’t be big and flashy: it’s a very niche use-case, but for those niches there’s really nothing like it
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”.
They’re here to stay. But things are ridiculous with every chat app adding AI companions or jetpack for wordpress begging me to generate an AI image
It’s still out there and going amazing!!! Despite the lack of mainstream media coverage, blockchain and smart contacts couldn’t be doing better.
On an unrelated topic, does anyone want to buy some NFTs? I can give you a really good deal. No take-backs, though.
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.
Things are still happening, it’s just slow to adopt.
E.g.
https://www.ledgerinsights.com/nasdaqs-calypso-now-supports-blockchain-based-collateral-workflows/
There’s a lot of work being done around tokenizing stocks. The 3 day settlement period would become instant for example. But that’s no small feat to implement. That could be a decades long endeavor between all exchanges for example.
Also until recently, the SEC was hostile towards it all in the USA, with some pivotal multi year long court cases only being resolved in the past year or so where the SEC lost. (E.g is Ethereum a security or not? Well, now it is not. Now we also have the ETFs)
Ethereum only recently had some pretty big upgrades as well, which are going to be key to unlocking growth potential as well. A couple months ago they had a peak of 800 transactions per second, and the road map of these upgrades going to >100k (note these are including the level 2 networks that use the L1 ethereum for their security, like Arbitrum. Level 1 is somewhere between 15-20 right now. As L1 grows, L2s also grow)
I don’t know when the killer app that brings everyone into daily use will happen, but more and more behind the scenes things will slowly adopt it and you won’t even realize it. Like maybe when you do a bank to bank transfer, it’ll be that Visa VTAP thing I linked above, and it won’t take 1 to 3 business days.
Also, NFTs. Wasn’t there a supposed use case for contract authenticity or something?
Expensive and useless. Decentralization was an illusion and they don’t solve any real problems
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).
Nothing because it was all bullshit because the underlying technology is just fundamentally flawed.
This isn’t news, lots of people always saw this when Bitcoin came out, but tech bro’s kept pushing it right until AI came out, then the completely forgot it ever existed
Oh that? It was bullshit just like AI.
