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by xkarga00
3044 days ago
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I think that the area where you want fault-tolerance the most is decentralized cash. If you are going to take control of your money you better do it in a fault-tolerant system. Many people don't care about it today but there are those who do. That's why cryptocurrency is the real killer app for blockchain, like it or not. To your comments re bitcoin, it sounds to me like somebody complaining that Internet is slow back in the 90s/00s. EDIT: I am not pontificating in favor of bitcoin. It's just that the technology is still immature but there is a lot of great and promising work happening today. |
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...Really? That's one application, sure, but I hardly think it compares to the generalizable usage of cryptographic fault-tolerance assurance in distributed systems. I would consider the elimination of trusted third parties in more well-established and widely used cryptographic protocols (like CAa) or improvements to e.g. NTP node fault-tolerance to be more presently and practically useful than decentralized payments (in particular, because blockchains are much more useful for the former examples than the latter in the present day).
> Many people don't care about it today but there are those who do. That's why cryptocurrency is the real killer app for blockchain, like it or not.
I don't have an emotional investment in what use case becomes the most successful for blockchains in perpetuity, so it isn't a matter of "liking" or "not liking" any particular application. Rather, I'm speaking in terms of present facts, and purposely not making any points about the future.
Sure, people could become passionate en masse about seizing control of their assets in a decentralized, trustless, permissionless, etc systems. I'm not discounting that possibility. But in the present case, blockchains exhibit far more utility for resolving hard problems in domains of computer science than they do for cryptocurrencies.
> To your comments re bitcoin, it sounds to me like somebody complaining that Internet is slow back in the 90s/00s.
I never considered the internet slow in either of those decades because it was all I knew. More to the point, I think you mistake me for someone who is bearish on cryptocurrencies or blockchains in general - I'm emphatically not. I just think that Bitcoin is not going to be the actual winner for that use case, and regardless of future innovations, it is pretty clearly not succeeding now, either, for the reasons I've already outlined.