Turns out the one thing Blockchain is good at, building out decentralized strings of commonly agreed upon immutable transactions, is actually not that useful. For small items we need an “undo” button because people make sloppy mistakes or get scammed, for large items we want the government to act as enforcer of the property (house, dollars, car) in question so it doesn’t actually help us to decentralize.
I was originally interested in crypto because I wanted to know how it managed to make truly decentralized, permissionless, peer-to-peer transactions possible. After I learned about how it did all that, I also learned three things:
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decentralized transactions are useless when so much of our economy leverages centralized transactions built around existing payment systems.
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permissionless transactions are useless when governments are ultimately in control of payments, and have the right to restrict certain payments regardless of how they are made.
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peer-to-peer transactions are useless when the currency is in so much investment demand that the price spikes, and nobody wants to spend it because it’s a StOrE oF vAlUe (and because of the tax implications)
So the crypto movement demonstrated it is possible to make a platform to transact on that is free of any reliance on any intermediary, but in practice so much of our existing commerce relies on intermediaries that removing all of them causes more problems.
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Obligatory www.web3isgoinggreat.com - catalogues all of the grifts, hacks and thefts, with a running $$$ total.
Damn all the comments seem to be heavily downvoted for some reason. Interesting. What advantages can blockchain bring you, other than crypto?
It’s pretty good at proving digital chain of custody. You could, for example, handle public records on a block chain.
I’ve been hoping for a game platform that tokenizes game licenses so that we can sell or gift them to others when we’re done with them - basically steam but you own your copy of the game and can sell it on. This is incredibly unlikely to happen though, a secondary market for digital licenses would eviscerate profits.
This is incredibly unlikely to happen though, a secondary market for digital licenses would eviscerate profits.
Licenses as NFTs could have the method youre looking for. When resold, the original creator of the license gets a small cut, usually about 5% of sale price. The vendor website gets tx fees and the seller gets 90-95% of the sale price.
Its a strong model imo.
Why would a game developer want that?
Why would they want residuals on digital resales?
Is that a serious question?
Why would they want resales?
Profits?
So you’re telling me a company would rather take one sale and two resales than 3 sales?
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I guess most people know a scam when they see one. More than I thought
Even if you were extremely generous and didn’t factor in the scams in your analysis, the reality is that a Blockchain solves problems 99.9% of people will never face. This breaks the whole imagined model, when your product is ultra niche but relies on mass adoption for its security.
I still hope that it can be used to make efficient transparent democracy somehow 😂😅
There’s no benefit there that would be useful to anyone. If you need a public ledger then you can just do that and skip the crypto BS
Yea, I was talking about a public ledger where the people ruled by the government host nodes and verify that laws and other stuff decided by the government are all stored there to make it harder for politicians to lie because everyone has the truth and can verify it.
Well something like this, I am not an expert in this, but I can imagine it having a use case there
I am an expert in this and cryptographic chaining of a public ledger is like large language models, interesting but ultimately useless.
I would not say that LLM are useless, just a bit overhyped
I am way more efficient in learning to code having this text bot give me explanations e.g. what which kernel API does
But you have to check to make sure the chatbot isn’t hallucinating the answers it gives you, so you could be even more efficient by just looking it up in the first place and skipping the extra step.
