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by arcticbull 1893 days ago
Correct. Blockchain is only able to extend its guarantees to concepts wholly encapsulated by the blockchain. That's the reason only "currencies" have been successful thus far. The boundary between the blockchain and the real world is not a surmountable one - not with the guarantees of the blockchain anyways. And once you get rid of the guarantees it's just a slow, inefficient database.

This is why, try as people might (in over a decade) they have yet to achieve literally anything that isn't a currency with it.

1 comments

I think this is not quite true. You can represent real world events and data with oracles. This is being now through Chainlink for things like security price data. Of course, it's probably not so simple to keep oracles in sync with increasingly niche real world data.
> You can represent real world events and data with oracles.

You can represent them, but that's about it.

For Ethereum contracts to be enforceable in the real world (and even in the digital world) you need significantly more than just representation.