Let's get a discussion going

Blockchain technology is Mostly Useless™

It’s pretty much nothing more than a distributed permanent ledger system for recording transactions.

That’s it.

It solves the same problem that having a trusted broker, like Amazon, or E*Trade, or PayPal, or Visa, or a title company, certify a transaction on your behalf solves.

And fails to solve a lot of other things brokers actually solve, as well.

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In any security system, there are three components.

These are:

Authentication — I am who I say I am
Authorization — who I say I am is allowed to do the thing I’m saying I want to do
Nonrepudiation — The person who requested this action actually requested it, and we’re sure it was them, and not someone pretending to be them
The part a permanent ledger solves is nonrepudiation.

Or to put it in terms a 5 year old could understand: “no backsies”.

So what problem can Blockchain solve that a permanent ledger held by a trusted broker not solve?

It can let you distribute the permanent ledger all over hell and gone, without having to resort to a trusted broker.

You can even keep your own copy, if you want.

And because of the cryptographic signatures, I can’t claim that I did not, in fact order and pay for that inflatable sheep fromThe Inflate-A-Date Corporation of Trenton, New Jersey.

You could do the same thing, with a broker like Amazon.

But now you don’t need Amazon to do it.

So what problems can’t Blockchain solve, that everyone mistakenly believes it can?

Great question, and one which no one asks, which is why I’m glad I’m pretending you’ve asked it.

Blockchain does not render transactions anonymous.

If anything, it’s a lot more like hiring the graffiti artistBanksyto write:

Bob Bobertson bought an inflatable sheep fromThe Inflate-A-Date Corporation of Trenton, New Jersey,and now he can’t claim it never happened

on 10,000 walls, distributed all over the planet.

And now, because everyone lovesBanksy’s work, third parties are copying that same graffiti to new walls, all the time.

Live a millennia, spend every waking hour scrubbing walls: that’s never going away.

And don't forget it's open sourced...

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I would say that blockchain has a number of important use cases (notary, digital assets, smart contracts, supply chain, voting, distributed storage, really any kind of tracking in any industry in the world), but it's currently being bogged down by shitcoins that function like tacking on a shitty get rich quick scheme to an otherwise solid idea.

Why does blockchain applications need to be tied to a speculative asset? I understand tokens are required as they are the means by which one participates in whatever blockchain application is being used, but I see no reason for token to have speculative value or be traded as a security.

It's like the moment you attach a tradable cryptocurrency to your blockchain idea, the value of the idea becomes entirely about trying to make a profit off the tokens. Why not make your tokens at a minuscule fixed value and exist entirely to facilitate the blockchain technology application? Then the value is held in the technology, not the tokens that facilitate it.

I think the majority of interest in crypto comes from people trying to make money buying and trading tokens. So long as this is the case, the baggage of it will prevent blockchain from being utilized to its full potential.

>t. i'm a middleman, pls dont kill my jerb

SHUT THE FUCK UP YOU STUPID FUDDER THIS TECHNOLOGY CHANGE THE WORLD!

Blockchain technology is entirely useless.

This is all a scam, all of it. I'd be shocked if anyones still talking about blockchains in ten years.

Databases won't save the world user.

Only truth can do that.

Until then just keep re birthing into cesspools.

Tax software is useless.
It solves the same problem as having a trusted CPA.

Shhh don’t tell the moonboys. Let them think it’s “revolutionary” that bitcorn has been around for 9 years and no real company wants to touch it.

the next generation of the internet
>useless
lmao kys

>Why does blockchain applications need to be tied to a speculative asset?
"why do"
some will, some won't.
all better?

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>no real company wants to touch blockchain
>what is JP Morgan, amazon, walmart, UPS, Fedex. etc etc

The only thing blockchain really does, is allow something to be made decentralized + immutable. There's currently some significant sacrifices in order to achieve this (energy, complexity, performance).

Right now the only reason to make such sacrifices is to battle corruption that could occur with a central entity.

The only such application that's worth a significant amount of money is... well, money. Money has always been prone to problems such as corruption, censorship, overinflation, etc.

This is why Bitcoin has value. All other altcoins are mostly speculatory on trying to make things like smart contracts be worth value.

You copied this from quora. Anyway, blockchain technology is great because it has the potential to upend those purveyors of user data - Big Tech. Similarly blockchain also has the potential to upturn government by bringing transparency to elections and how making a more direct democracy possible. Blockchain has the potential to be revolutionary

>Anyway, blockchain technology is great because it has the potential to upend those purveyors of user data - Big Tech.

How would it do that?

It is harder for large organizations to transition to any new technology. The larger the organization the more difficult it is to be nimble. This is why with other new tech areas like AI and VR for example the big tech have instead resorted to acquisition. Blockchain adoption will come and it will break into the forefront as time goes on

zcash solves this.

didn't read.
...okay, i read it. because of the weird way that you've written this, i get the feeling that you've put a hidden message in your writing.
regardless, if you don't get how truly decentralized blockchains are gonna change everything and how they can never, ever be stopped—well, i don't necessarily expect you, or anyone else to. you make your investments, and i'll make mine.

also if you copied this from somewhere you're a faggot

A lot of big tech products are free to the individual user - most google products, Facebook, twitter and so on. These companies make money by selling ads and user data. With mature decentralized versions of these platforms coming into the picture, it becomes possible to literally upend their business. It's no wonder they haven't welcomed blockchain with open arms- it would be like a taxi company rolling out the red carpet for Uber

Blockchains are very simple technology-wise, large companies don't need to aquihire for these as there's not a huge amount of technical domain knowledge that's needed before being able to implement.

Also, Google has been at the forefront of AI for a while. They don't need to aquihire for AI talent (although they still do since AI engineers are so in demand), they have plenty of AI experts in house, and can just hire for those positions normally.

Just because it's decentralized doesn't mean it's free to host. They need to be hosted, and those that host (node operators) need to get paid somehow. That payment comes from ads.

Also, google products like Google Maps and Google Search require huge teams of people to engineer, maintain, and update them. If you think implementing a robust search engine on par with Google's is a simple task, then you have absolutely no idea.

Lastly, even if by some miracle, millions of dollars were invested in engineers to build such a robust decentralized search engine, there would barely be any incentive for the end user to switch products. Unless a significant advantage is provided to the end user, they won't make the switch to an experimental product.

Cryptocurrency is about not giving government control over the most important thing that you can have: money.
Everything else is just a tool to empower that singular mission.
If you don't understand that, don't waste time with crypto, you will go broke.

see all those banks and financial institutions, with you know, 30~40 storey buildings, that make up what 30% of your city....

well the block chain takes 20 stories of those building, makes them redundant, just that is what probably a trillion$ in floorspace, wages, upkeep, IT systems etc etc....

>why not set the price of a token to be miniscule?

Whats stopping me from paying slightly above that price to get someone to sell his tokens to me instead of some other guy?