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by havkom 2979 days ago
We now live in the information age. Blockchains and AI will transform everyday life as well as specific sectors such as health care and trade.

Imagine walking in to a Starbucks café, order a cup of coffee, digitally signing a payment transaction on your mobile or laptop and then wait for it to be confirmed by the Blockchain while enjoying the hot cup of coffee you have ordered.

What is more, think about AI, you will not need to talk to the staff to place an order for your coffee. The staff can relax and watch you make gestures to a camera. They will be able to read on a screen if you’d like it white or black.

I think the article is too negative and does not see the big picture of transformation that is going on (as exemplified above).

6 comments

> Imagine walking in to a Starbucks café, order a cup of coffee, digitally signing a payment transaction on your mobile or laptop and then wait for it to be confirmed by the Blockchain while enjoying the hot cup of coffee you have ordered.

You could do the the exact same thing now with credit cards, except the waiting. And then you could get your money back if the coffee sucked, and you wouldn't lose all your money if someone happened to steal your private key .

Pretty sure it was sarcasm.
It's important to keep Poe's law in mind when you're posting plain-text parody; you don't have tone of voice and body language to help convey your real intent.
Probably, but it's hard to tell in this debate where believers constantly have to rely on forgetting about existing technology completely.
> Imagine walking in to a Starbucks café, order a cup of coffee, digitally signing a payment transaction on your mobile or laptop and then wait for it to be confirmed by the Blockchain while enjoying the hot cup of coffee you have ordered.

I think you can already pay contactless either by your mobile or credit card and without the need of Blockchain.

> What is more, think about AI, you will not need to talk to the staff to place an order for your coffee. The staff can relax and watch you make gestures to a camera. They will be able to read on a screen if you’d like it white or black.

In McDonalds you have automatic machines that you can place an order and pay, e.g., contactless, without bothering the staff. Later you only just need to pick your order up.

I'd like you to know I got the sarcasm, even if nobody else did :)
Ah, I missed it.
It could have been more evident with Random Capitalization and effecting the utilization of grandiose Vocabulary... but on second thought that would just make it harder to distinguish from the original crackpots.
Imagine opening a mobile app, ordering a cup of coffee to a nearest Starbucks, having your transaction confirmed in matters of seconds and only then walking into a Starbucks where your cup is waiting for you.

You can do that right now, with no blockchain in sight.

What is more... interesting(?) - is that starbucks might have reason to use blockchain tech for non-public systems (info sharing with suppliers/vendors/etc, currency exchange between countries, etc) but it would be completely independent of any public use of blockchain, and we'd never know (or need to know, or care).
For info sharing with suppliers etc, you have systems with trust. Calling each other's APIs with authentication credentials. Old solutions are much better than blockchains there.
I don't disagree entirely. I think there may be some ... I don't want to say completely 'new' benefit to blockchain in this respect, but as it's explored more, there may be some other benefits which go beyond current approaches to info sharing/trust.

I suspect it will end up being more like 'nosql' - appropriate as an adjunct tech to deal with specific use cases, vs a foundational mindset to build everything on top of. But... that's just my own half-coffeed-this-morning thoughts...

Imagine being a Venezuelan right now.

https://www.wired.com/story/where-could-bitcoin-succeed-as-a...

Everything is fine, right up until the moment it's not.

AI will transform everyday life.

Blockchain may be used by businesses and make early proponents wealthy