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by sagitariusrex 2610 days ago
I don't remember who first said it but blockchain has exactly one killer feature, Bitcoin. If you try to adapt it anywhere else you're probably abusing the tech.
4 comments

I would argue that Ethereum smart contracts are much more useful than bitcoin itself. PoW, on the other hand, is a complete waste of resources.
Smart contracts are stupid for a variety of reasons, the biggest one is that the main feature of contracts is not automatic and literal enforcement.
I saw another very interesting use that I don't fully understand from a technical perspective, but it basically promised to accurately report position-at-time, via a system of transponders.

The use case is, I can tell when Fedex or the local pizza place is lying to me about my delivery being 30 minutes away, or half a mile down the street, or whether the delivery driver actually attempted to physically deliver my package to my door at 5:47pm or not. (Or Ikea can verify that their subcontracted delivery driver actually got the couch to the buyer on Sunday, or both Uber and I can know exactly where I was dropped off and picked up and when, etc., etc., without either party being able to lie about it.)

A friend of mine agreed that the idea was good, but looked into their implementation and said it was a horrorshow.

Well, that is already working pretty well. E.g. large carriers are using that in their operations, one of the distinctions between those and small time operators. One of the biggest benefits of this is the electronic proof of delivery. Just how Blockchain would help with I didn't get yet.
I think they slathered some "blockchain" on it, when they probably meant to say "cryptography"; the big value-add was that the records were tamper-proof - there was somehow no way to claim you were dropping a package off at my house when you were actually miles away.

Not sure how it worked, though. :(

>I don't remember who first said it but blockchain has exactly one killer feature, Bitcoin.

So zero killer features, then.

Read up on Namecoin and see if you still agree with that statement. Blockchain for DNS is a pretty brilliant solution, IMO.
Except that you don't have any solution for preventing squatting or other kinds of domain abuse. By design, they place this system above the court system. I'm pretty sure this is only appealing to some kind of anarcho-technologists.