[r00bot]

I personally take a hesitant approach to crypto/blockchain technology. I'm open to using it where it's legitimately better than other approaches, but for the vast, vast majority of applications traditional methods are always going to be better than shoe-horned decentralization.

It's very unfortunate that the grifters have given the technology such a bad name when, like any technology, it has applications it excels in and others it doesn't. We're still definitely in the phase of working out what, if anything, blockchain is better (than centralised implementations) for. And it sucks that that search is being negatively impacted by all the grifters.

In the future I wouldn't be surprised if we saw 99.99% of blockchain stuff dead, but the small percentage that survive could disrupt some industries (I'm not convinced finance is one of those industries though lol).

[dmitriid]

> like any technology, it has applications it excels in

Name five.

[dane-pgp]

1. Permissionless, censorship-resistant global money transfer

2. Smart contracts

3. Append-only logs synchronised between mutually distrusting parties

4. Decentralised identities

5. Microtransactions for online games and to replace web advertising

[NoGravitas]

1. Except cryptocurrencies aren't any good for that, because the transaction costs are too high, and the value of cryptocurrencies too volatile. Cryptocurrencies are not a medium of exchange.

2. Now, what's a valid use-case for a smart contract, and please explain how it functions if there's a bug in the contract?

3. Maybe. You'll need to provide a more concrete use-case. Also, you have the outside-world problem (you know the data hasn't been altered, but you don't necessarily know where it comes from).

4. All you need for decentralized identities is a public key. (Though if you want your identity to be long-lived, you'll have to also have a system of secure key rotation, and the most straightforward system is blockchain-ish in that it involves a signed append-only log. But it doesn't need a global trustless ledger.

5. See 1, except worse, because the transaction cost dwarf the actual payment.

[dane-pgp]

1. If you're sending a portion of your monthly wages as a remittance to your family, spending a dollar[1] isn't too much.

2. A smart contract allows decentralised organisations to function, with democratic voting and transparency. (That's not appropriate or necessary for every organisation, but it can be an improvement on one person hosting a server and saying "Trust me"). If there's a bug in the contract, you have to vote to change the contract. Traditional contracts, businesses, and even countries fail all the time, but we haven't give up on them as concepts.

3. For a concrete use-case, I offer the example of blockchain technology being used to make the fishing industry supply chain more transparent.[3] It's true that someone could enter fake information onto the blockchain, but they could also fake signatures on paperwork, so a system can still be useful even if it doesn't prevent all possible attacks.

4. If the ledger isn't trustless, then someone is controlling it, so your identities aren't really decentralised.

5. There are better currencies than BTC if transaction costs are the main concern. The equivalent number for BCH is half a cent.[5]

[1] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin-transactionfees...

[3] https://www.reutersevents.com/sustainability/using-blockchai...

[5] https://bitinfocharts.com/comparison/bitcoin%20cash-transact...

[dmitriid]

> A smart contract allows decentralised organisations to function, with democratic voting and transparency.

A smart contract is neither smart, nor a contract. It's a program, written in an esoteric language, and running in the world's most inefficient VM.

It's so bad and overcomplicated that "smart contract" authors themselves routinely make mistakes in code equivalent to the most basic of actual contracts. And since there's no avenue of recourse, these mistakes are irreversible.

"Smart contracts" also require the user to pay for any meaningful action.

As for "transparency", there's no transparency when something is enforced by code very few can read and understand (compared to actual contracts that can be read by humans).

As for "democracy", there's nothing democratic about "who has the most money has the most votes".

> Traditional contracts, businesses, and even countries fail all the time, but we haven't give up on them as concepts

Because we have thousands of years of history teaching us how to deal with those, and guess what, we've come up with multiple things like:

- regulations

- contract clauses dealing with failure

- avenues of recourse

- various methods of enforcement

Crypto bros pretend that these things are unnecessary, but then immediately turn to courts to sue scammers, or cry in cryptoforums when a "smart contract" bug wipes their wallets out.

[EGreg]

Sorry, but you sound like tech skeptics in every generation ever, saying “the Dewey Decimal system works perfectly well, why do we need computers just to find a book”? (Yes, I have heard this exact objection raised by radio hosts to early computer pioneers who tried to explain why computers will become useful for regular people.)

Email became useful and replaced the post office

Web 1.0 became useful and replaced TV, radio, magazines

Web 2.0 became useful and allowed people to communicate but still hasn’t been truly decentralized

What makes you think that Web3 replacing trusted gatekeepers is not useful? You think “just trust me” is the best system we can possibly have for writing code that does some business logic?

For me it’s simple: if there is something that’s very valuable (some NFT, some role, some election, some large balance of USDT) then I prefer that my customers custody their own keys and deal with that themselves. Less liability for me. Rather than having a guy with keys to the database log in and potentially change the result of an election, and having to track down logs and deal with lawsuits etc. I just want smart contracts to deal with it, and each participant can only take the actions they are allowed to take - no exceptions. No central point of failure for security. No need for audits OF TRANSACTIONSby auditors who can also be corrupted.

How do we make sure that smart contracts are correct? Audits, battle testing and with Cardano we even have provable correctness. UniSwap likely has no exploitable bugs, for instance, or they would have been found. Every instance of UniSwap AMMs comes out of the same factory. THE END RESULT is far more reliable than any code that runs on only one machine by a “trust me” corp.

Sorry buddy, you can shill your centralized “trust me” all you want but you sound like Peter Schiff and his gold. You just don’t get it.

1. No liability for transactions, only for code

2. Open source infrastructure

3. No central entities who can corrupt the system in unlimited ways

4. People can only do what is allowed, no matter what

5. Code operates regardless of whether the central entity is around in 20-30 years

6. Different incentives (selling tokens is far more user-friendly than selling shares to a parasitic investor class that will cause you to extract rents forever and introduce dark patterns and lockin at the expense of the public).

7. Interoperability — on-chain data can be used for other smart contracts and any websites can read the data.

8. Global interoperability, no need to rely on a patchwork of currencies and money transmission legs and banks that Stripe takes care of for you. USDC is an ERC20 token and you write code, not connecting to a billion little APIs. Similarly to HTTP letting you go worldwide vs what Twilio had to do for you, or negotiating syndication by radio stations.

Of course I think blockchain is a first-gen technology but it enables this and a lot more !

[lehmannro]

The only concrete use case you've offered “is unlikely to deliver substantial gains to the industry when compared to alternatives” such as shared databases, which don't require any costly consensus algorithm.

https://doi.org/10.1016/j.techsoc.2020.101298

[tester756]

>1. Permissionless, censorship-resistant global money transfer

>5. Microtransactions for online games and to replace web advertising

how money transfer and microtransactions are different?

[dane-pgp]

They are (at least) two separate use cases, even though they are both examples of sending money. (You could equally say that they are all examples of sending data).

1. Some people want to be able to send large amounts of money internationally to their family in a country which has currency controls and "official" exchange rates. Others want to be able to send funds to organisations that have been banned by traditional money transmitters, such as Wikileaks, or protest groups, or adult content, or cannabis.

5. Separate groups of people don't have a problem with their government's fiscal or censorship policies, but simply want to be able to buy an emote or a skin in an online game, or to listen to a piece of music or read an article without being tracked around the web or needing to wire 50 cents from their bank in Mongolia to the service provider's bank in Cyprus.

[salawat]

1. The problem there is exactly why the space is going to remain a reserve for fundamentally illegal activity. Arguably it shouldn't be. I get that. That still doesn't get me any closer to me suggesting anyone's grandma hop into Web3.

5. So you're still being tracked, because there isn't a company around that isn't monetizing viewership data. Also, if you're fine with fiscal policies, why are you hesitant to wire? Sounds to me like you're dissatisfied with your host country's fiscal controls, or service provider's offerings.

Look, control over financial networks is one of the most powerful soft control mechanisms on the planet. You will not work around that. Government is slow to catch up, but I assure you, these folks aren't stupid anywhere close to 100% of the time. The fact regulation is crystalizing around crypto as fast as it is without taking the multi-century learning experience trad-fi did is evidence enough of that.

If it comes down to "a bunch of nerds created an unregulable financial system" I can pretty much guarantee it'll get gobbled by trad-fi snd re-centralized.

In fact, anyone could roll their own financial networks without using banks/Visa/you name it. No one has because we've made laws that specifically increase the barrier to entry because finance is the spine that provides support for all manner of economic activity, which includes the illegal stuff, and Government is putatively in the business of making sure that the illegal stuff doesn't see the light of day.

I just do not see the compelling argument that'll carry weight to switch someone from "financial system that makes crime hard" to "financial system that makes crime easy" and feel alright about it. You have to already accept that crime is just an endemic human phenomena, and this is just a rebalancing of the spectrum.

Given you've got much more efficient implementations of your other use cases available, this is the sticking point for me. No people I've spoken to and laid out what Web3 really is, even with the most charitable framing gets passed that.

If I can't convince people it's a good idea with full disclosure in effect, I'm not sure it's something worth pushing forward.

[r00bot]

I don't really think there are five applications it excels in, but there might be in the future..?

Like I said, we're still working out what it's good for. I've seen promising applications but nothing I'd say is obviously better than traditional technology. To dismiss the entire technology because of (admittedly a lot of) grifters is premature in my opinion.

[dmitriid]

You said it has applications it excels at. Turns out "maybe in the future" and "we're still figuring out".

So. No applications it excels at.

> To dismiss the entire technology because of (admittedly a lot of) grifters is premature in my opinion.

It's been 13 years. When will dismissing it become mature? In another 13 years?

Or maybe the tech is just bad.