[TomSwirly]

Cryptography is not blockchain.

Blockchain is a very heavy technology that solves the Consensus Problem. That's amazing, but almost no real world problems except cryptocurrency has a Consensus Problem.

For almost everything else, there are much simpler, easier-to-understand and _far_ computationally lighter cryptographic solutions that aren't blockchain.

[KDJohnBrown]

When the blockchain / dapp hype got huge for a minute in 2017, I asked a “crypto enthusiast” friend to pitch me on why I should use his dapp (some sort of gambling game).

He went on and on about double spending and consensus. i asked him why anybody, even his “ico investors” would care about any of that just to play a (slow) game.

He went back into double spending and byzantium generals and using Brave for tokenized payments.

This pattern repeated with every single dapp I came across.

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Definitely sounds like an inability to pitch correctly. In the case of a gambling game there are a number of things that you could pitch in a better way:

  * It's possible to gamble even in jurisdictions that make it illegal.
  * The rules are encoded and visible, the house might always win, but at least they're not cheating.

Disclaimer: I'm not pro gambling

[ntr--]

Neither of those require a fleet of GPUs powered by a hydroelectric dam to balance the accounting.

The former point almost certainly makes small disposable servers in a variety of jurisdictions a requirement. There might be many millions of crypto users around the world, but there are very few running their own nodes, and fewer still actively mining. Block generation is practically as monopolised as the banking system it supposedly replaces.

To the latter, I worked a cryptocurrency casino and the provably fair algorithms were implemented using the core Node.js crypto libraries and completely independent from all the blockchain nodes. The sheer frequency of by users completely rules out any chance of leveraging a smart contract or block data as a base for the RNG.