[notpachet]

As one of those non-crypto decentralized advocates, I am not super optimistic. I think the best case would be that we manage to build a bunch of generic decentralized infrastructure while all the easy money is being thrown around at the bottom of the Ponzi pyramid, and then that infrastructure manages to survive and continue to provide value even after the cryptocurrency house of cards collapses.

[iskander]

> then that infrastructure manages to survive and continue to provide value even after the cryptocurrency house of cards collapses.

That's my optimistic forecast for what happens after the current speculative bubble pops. We'll be left with e.g. universal sign-on via crypto wallet that's not owned by any corporation and can be used for cryptographic signature / voting / &c. We'll also have increasingly robust decentralized infrastructure like zero-knowledge rollup L2s on top of Ethereum to make increasing complex decentralized applications. The money making stuff is about as vacuous as everyone seems to think but the substance it's attached to is a movement away from walled gardens and towards increasingly empowered individuals.

[AlexandrB]

> That's my optimistic forecast for what happens after the current speculative bubble pops. We'll be left with e.g. universal sign-on via crypto wallet that's not owned by any corporation and can be used for cryptographic signature / voting / &c.

This seems entirely self-contradictory. How do you certify that a nominally anonymous cryptographic ID represents a particular individual for the purposes of signature/voting without some real-world (likely centralized!) entity establishing a connection between the two?

This seems like fundamentally the same problem that SSL certificates are trying to solve for website identity and I don't see how blockchain removes the need for a central authority somewhere if you want guarantees like "one person, one vote".

[iskander]

Why assume you need a pseudonymous persona to map onto a real world ID? Check out how DAO proposals work at e.g. https://gitcoin.co/grants/

[dbmikus]

There's a bunch of cool stuff if you Google "proof of {humanity,personhood}". Here's the wiki page: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Proof_of_personhood

It's all pretty new and not proven long term, but it is an area of active research.