[015a]

Helium (https://www.helium.com/); a decentralized mobile internet network operator which enables anyone to host radios and earn tokens for usage, without compromising the connection security of endpoint users.

Filecoin (https://filecoin.io/); an incentive layer on top of IPFS to create a decentralized long-term object storage system.

Tradelens (https://www.tradelens.com/); in development, AP Moller Maersk's enterprise container logistics/coordination blockchain.

Anytime someone says "blockchains don't do anything which centralized systems can't do", I mentally interpret that as someone in 1995 saying "email can't do anything fax machines can't do". In the sense that: its kind of true, in that they accomplish a similar goal of sending a document from one person to another over wire, but it discounts as irrelevant the most critical, foundational thrust of why this new technology is interesting. For email: that it is all-digital. For blockchain: that it is decentralized.

In the 90s, the people who still clung to fax machines didn't understand why an all-digital future was important or would matter. They had spent their entire lives living in physicality, working with paper and file cabinets, and it was fine. The fax machine made sense. Email didn't.

Sure, centralized systems can do many of these things better. But they do so with the sacrifice of being centralized! Some critics inexplicably gloss over this like its an irrelevant, minor part of the argument. They've spent their entire lives among big tech billion dollar centralized multinational conglomerates, and its been fine. More centralization makes sense; email, I mean, decentralization, doesn't.

The point is not to make a better system, in every way; the point is making a functional system that is decentralized, so it can operate in a trustless, geo-distributed, multi-party way.

[phillipcarter]

>The point is not to make a better system, in every way; the point is making a functional system that is decentralized, so it can operate in a trustless, geo-distributed, multi-party way.

Let me preface this by saying that I think it's deranged how ad-driven and surveillance-driven modern centralized tech has become.

Why is what you are saying good for me and others?

I can see some value in a currency that isn't specific to a government, so that I can more freely exchange it for good and services anywhere in the world. But I don't live everywhere, I mostly just live in one country. If I wave my hands and imagine a future that doesn't exist yet, maybe if much of my life is stuck in the "metaverse" then that could have benefits. But none of these things require decentralization or trustlessness (in fact, the "metaverse" looks to be headed towards more of the same centralization we see today).

Please don't say "you just don't get it" or whatever that so many crypto people do today. That isn't convincing.

[chrisco255]

Crypto provides a global pool of capital, and smart contracts provide a universal interface for establishing programmable rules for how capital is managed.

This is a sea change akin to the discovery of double-entry bookkeeping or the common stock corporation. You may reside in one jurisdiction your entire life, but the whole point of the internet is to connect humanity. You have no doubt interacted with hundreds or thousands of people in your lifetime online that reside in other states or countries than yourself.

If you want to coordinate with people across jurisdictions to create a venture or a charity or a political movement or a software start up or a video game project or create an artistic franchise, traditionally you need a pre-established relationship to do so. Because one person ultimately has to be in charge of finances if capital is involved. This creates a touchy situation. What happens if your partner in China or Argentina or Zimbabwe wants to custody the funds? You need to not only trust the person to be the treasurer and not run off with the money, but also the local banking laws and rules guarding those bank accounts. This makes coordination across distances difficult and unpredictable and fraught with risk.

Contrast that with placing those funds in a multisig, where you and your 3 teammates (from 3 different countries) all must sign-off on every expenditure from that multisig smart contract. Maybe you're ok with 3 out of 4 signing off on expenditures, that's fully customizable, since it's all code. You can also effortlessly swap between different currency pairs, whether that be Ether, or Bitcoin, or USDC, or Japanese Yen, and reinvest the treasury into yield generating strategies (since there is demand for on-chain loans and there does exist permissionless 24/7 on-chain money markets).

Now, don't lose sight of the big picture, because there's 7-8 billion human beings on this planet, and currently it is nearly impossible to coordinate, raise, and manage capital in a meaningful way for the vast majority of these humans. This is unlocking the capital availability of Silicon Valley for the whole world.

[phillipcarter]

Distributed, borderless raising of capital seems like a great application.

But I guess where I'm not seeing it is here:

> The point is not to make a better system, in every way; the point is making a functional system that is decentralized, so it can operate in a trustless, geo-distributed, multi-party way.

A way to raise capital with less restrictions would support this statement. But that's just one application. And I'm not in the business of raising capital.

[paulgb]

> In the sense that: its kind of true, in that they accomplish a similar goal of sending a document from one person to another over wire, but it discounts as irrelevant the most critical, foundational thrust of why this new technology is interesting. For email: that it is all-digital. For blockchain: that it is decentralized.

This confuses the real-world benefit with the means of achieving that benefit. The benefit of email wasn't that it is digital, but that it is near-instant, accessible from anywhere, etc. It's able to do those things because it's digital, but the fact that it's digital is an implementation detail, not the thing driving people to use it.

It seems the issue facing blockchain is that it's stuck on the “it's decentralized” message without having a good story for why that matters (and matters enough to be worth the other trade-offs) to something like file storage or an ISP.

[Daishiman]

I'm not actually seeing how this helps decentralization.

At some point if you're a rich-enough party you can just take over these networks with enough money and resources. There aren't that many mining pools for BTC, and the distribution of ownership of most coins still follows a power law. These systems don't really do anything to discourage that.

Also you talk about the benefits of decentralization as if they were more important than the gains you get from centralized systems. They're generally not, except for fringe cases. For the most part I want a centralized system with someone to blame/sue who can use one big database to make my transactions flow fast.

I won't deny that there's value at the fringes to decentralized, robust systems, but that value is at best 2% of what crypto defenders claim.

[015a]

> At some point if you're a rich-enough party you can just take over these networks with enough money and resources.

This is such a concern levied against cryptocurrency; why does no one levy the same concern against traditional publicly traded companies? That someone who is rich and powerful enough could simply take control of Apple, or Walmart (assuming they make >50% of their outstanding shares available for trade on the public markets, which some public companies do)?

The reality is: It is a concern. But its a vanishingly small one. To do so would be, in many cases, suicide; and it would be even more-so with cryptocurrencies. It would take an obscene amount of money and resources, converted into assets which held value under the societal context of the status quo. The status quo doesn't like changing; the assets would probably lose all their value as everyone in the 49% abandons their investment. What would this hostile takeover gain? A few billion in revenue? They'd lose far more in the attempt.

For most newer cryptocurrencies (not Bitcoin), this attack is not a matter of owning 51% of the mining power, but rather 51% of the currency itself (proof of stake). To do so, for any reasonably successful and valuable currency, would be crazy. Its just not a concern, period.

It may be worth elucidating this, but: bitcoin is on the way out. The crypto community has absolutely striated into two groups; the bitcoin traditionalists who build ten acre data centers next to volcanos to farm their digital gold, and those more forward thinking who are actually interested in solving the bigger, more tactile problems with cryptocurrency like real use cases, environmental impact, etc. So, many of the concerns surrounding bitcoin, which evolved in the '10s when it was the fastest growing player on the block, are simply no longer relevant.

[theamk]

The takeover/shutdown is a totally valid concern with traditional companies as well, and happens all the time. See "our incredible journey" blog [0] for recent examples.

However, with traditional companies, we are protected by contract law -- if we are paying a company for service, they should at least refund the money (this is not ideal, see Nest Smart home shutdown, but at least something). And banks/investment firms have even more protection for users' accounts. This is possible because the company owners are operating within the law framework, and this framework, being very old and battle-tested, handles acquisitions properly.

No such things exists for crypto. If someone takes over BTC tomorrow, they can secretly siphon as much money as they can before driving the network to ground.

[0] https://ourincrediblejourney.tumblr.com/

[paulgb]

The companies making mining hardware are even more centralized. Bitmain has been estimated to control 80% (!) of the mining market[1]. That stat is a few years old now, but if you look at purchase orders for large public miners, the centralization seems even more pronounced.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2018-05-17/china-s-c...

[perl4ever]

>centralized systems

It bothers me when people talk about (de)centralization because I think it's more ambiguous than appears at first and the definition needs to be examined more closely.

Things "on the blockchain" may be physically decentralized, and may not be controlled by one entity, but aren't they usually logically more centralized?

Consider real estate, which sometimes people fantasize about moving it to a blockchain registry. It probably seems natural to many people especially if they live in a country where that's how it works now, only the national government keeps the land registry.

But in the US, there isn't a national registry that determines who owns what. It's an oddity kind of like the absence of a proper national ID card or gun registry.

If we switched to a system that utilized crypto, it would be definitely marketed as "decentralized", but it would be a profound move towards centralization in a different sense. If the code had a flaw then everybody would be screwed, whereas currently we have this inefficient system with title insurance and so on, but if something goes wrong it's a local issue.

I can't be a true believer when I feel like the language has been corrupted and there isn't terminology to express things correctly so maybe people can't even think the thoughts they need to.

[BenoitEssiambre]

Email is decentralized. The internet is decentralized. This problem was already solved much more efficiently.

[chrisco255]

How many people do you know that run their own email servers or host their own blogs? Ah, yes, Web2 led to monopolies because the only practical forms of monetization were ads and subscriptions, and now 99% of internet traffic routes through FAANG servers.