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by lunch 1615 days ago
> Blockchains are good when there's a lack of trust and decentralization is absolutely necessary. There are very few problems that actually need a blockchain.

How about the current status quo of the Internet? Do you think being mined, sold, and endlessly tracked is OK?

3 comments

No. But you don't need blockchain to solve that. Things like BitTorrent work perfectly fine without the needless blockchain element.
BitTorrent is wonderful for sharing information, but it's not really a platform to build on. Something like Ethereum on the other hand is literally a decentralized computer that no single entity controls. The blockchain part enables this.
a "decentralized"[0] ""computer"" which is less powerful than a 9 year old rasberry pi. is this not the definition of hype?

[0]: https://thenextweb.com/news/ethereum-nodes-cloud-services-am....

It's not, but blockchains don't magically fix that. And the "web3" stuff built so far is still pretty centralized and could include that same tracking if the incumbents so chose.
Of course a blockchain doesn't magically fix anything, it's a distributed log. But a decentralized distributed log is a great building block for something that isn't owned by FAANG.
Right... and based on the second half of my comment, I don't believe anyone has actually successfully done the second half of your comment.
I don't want to be tracked so I'm going to put everything in a public ledger.