[xt00]

Blockchain's primary utility is in creating what initially was a complicated way to allow people to convert money into another currency that was easy to transfer around the world and use in ways that people would not want to use real fiat currency for. Without that utility, the whole thing would be a boring article somebody wrote back in 2008. Without the obfuscation of blockchain and mining and distributed ledger and all that, if people in china said "hey I want to convert my RMB into something called magic money that allows me to move 1 billion RMB into another country", the government would block them. But when they did it with bitcoin nobody initially freaked out because they were confused.. so eventually blockchain will be improved and as it improves it will become more centralized, more reliable, and less anonymous.. no big surprise this has happened many times before in the various era's of the internet...

[rosser]

> Blockchain's primary utility is in creating what initially was a complicated way to allow people to convert money into another currency...

Blockchain's primary utility has nothing to do with money. An attempted alternative to fiat currency is just an easy, obvious application of the distributed ledger/consensus capability that a blockchain offers.

This myopic focus on "blockchain == cryptocurrency" misses so much of the point, it would be laughable — if it weren't tragic.

[pwinnski]

It was incredibly myopic of Satoshi Nakamoto to start with a white paper titled "Bitcoin: A Peer-to-Peer Electronic Cash System" for sure. That Nakamoto guy missed _so much_ of the point.

Or maybe people want the point to be something other than it was.

Yeah, that's the laughable part.

[rosser]

You're confusing Bitcoin with blockchain. The former is a specific implementation — the first, yes, but that doesn't limit its other uses — of the latter. The latter is an abstraction that has uses far beyond mere money.

That's the myopia. If you (the general you) can't see the difference, I'm not the one who's short-sighted.

[xt00]

Totally agree that they are separate things but I’m talking about how the technology was immediately leveraged.. for example if we were talking about how roads can be used for lots of things other than allowing cars and trucks to drive fast.. Blockchain is infrastructure, so without a use for the infrastructure it’s just boring new tech.. I mean maybe an example of what I mean by boring new tech is like a new programming language.. “Blap programming language allows you to write everything as a monad! All monads all the time!”... that kind of thing.. it’s like ok some new infrastructure but what does it allow me to do with it? That’s what I’m talking about.. I think Blockchain is super cool and I love the distributed nature of not trusting people, but I am concerned that the history of other technologies that are cool initially because they are decentralized will end up being controlled by people who benefit from the tech the most and people that benefit are likely to be subject to scrutiny by various governments.. so that’ll end up screwing everything up.. so that concerns me..

[pwinnski]

I'm not confusing them. I'm pointing out that the first implementation didn't even use the word blockchain, but was focused entirely on bitcoin as a currency.

That someone can come along later and imagine (though not really demonstrate) other uses of an underlying technology is fine and dandy, but it's definitely not myopic to think that the person who initially created and linked the two concepts wasn't stupid.