[676234e117]

It may never meet the impact of the web but held to that standard, maybe no technology ever will.

The killer application is Ethereum and the ideas it has spawned, including new global financial instruments like stablecoins, decentralized exchanges, NFTs.. and cryptography like zk-STARKs and MPC.

With PoS and privacy enabled rollups this technology can certainly disrupt and compete with today’s popular payment processors in the next few years.

But yes, the most successful consumer applications will probably be boring, like PayPal or Apple or Stripe adding blockchain based mechanisms under the hood.

[Yizahi]

- stablecoins - this one is thousands years old, because it's essentially IOUs. Nothing new or special, excepts of course Giancarlo's token printer :) .

- DEX - sure, new thing. We all see how it works out. This is what, 5th DEX exploit just this year? And I'm talking only about big exploits.

- NFT - literally useless junk build on lies and insane lies. I dare you to name even one area which NFT can improve.

- cryptography - maybe, I don't know. Though I suspect that those developments can be simply self serving for token industry and not really transferable to other industries.

- BigCorp adding blockchain - why though? What would they get by introducing a private, inefficient, slow and not user friendly (users = employees of those corps) data storage? Private BC completely defeats all its small promises about decentralisation or privacy etc.

[676234e117]

- ERC20 stablecoins are not a paper IOU but ok.

- all these protocols are beta software, less than a few years old. Uniswap as one of the oldest is probably also the most secure.

- NFT: ability to hold custody over a digital record without relying on a single private company's servers to uphold that. But I expect you will move the goalposts...

- Cryptography: take a minute to look at developments in ZKP, MPC, new signature schemes. Many uses outside of pure blockchain[1].

- BigCorp: because they can extract value from it. If 5% of Shopify or PayPal users want to use crypto payments, the company can support that method and charge rent on it. Or they can ignore crypto, and let another company absorb the potential revenue. But because they like profit, this is why we see Shopify, Stripe, and PayPal all integrating crypto currency.

[1] https://blog.cloudflare.com/introducing-zero-knowledge-proof...

[Yizahi]

Accepting external cryptotokens like BTC or ETH is one thing, but it is totally not a "like PayPal or Apple or Stripe adding blockchain based mechanisms under the hood" end quote. Sure, assuming external ecosystem is at least somehow working on it's own, then payment processors can integrate with it. But using blockchain tech internally is dumb and pointless. (unless we are talking about Git, but tokenbros try to pretend that is not a blockchain anyway)

I don't see how digital IOUs is anything novel or invented by tokenbros. Paper or digital, it's the same this essentially.

NFTs... How EXACTLY does NFT "holds custody" of anything? Please describe what do you mean by that.

[676234e117]

If you are asking "how does NFT hold custody" of a digital record then I assume you have never looked at how NFTs work at a technical level. If you know code, you can look at the ERC721 spec yourself.

A practical example of an application on top of this is namespace aliases that are held non custodially by the users through an ERC721 contract - see ENS. The user's private key gives them access to a record within a smart contract, allowing them to update some state or transfer ownership of the data object.

[Yizahi]

Haha, you got me :) . DNS records is actually a valid case. I have no idea if it is also a "better" case, but lets assume so for the sake of argument.

I will clarify my question better now, hopefully. How EXACTLY does NFT "hold custody" of anything not living fully on on the blockchain already? So any physical object, or any digital object outside of cryptotokens and DNS records on the blockchain.

[676234e117]

> How EXACTLY does NFT "hold custody" of anything not living fully on on the blockchain already?

I am not suggesting it does. I am suggesting it allows you to hold ownership of an asset on the blockchain. At this point it means ENS, art, collectibles, loans, stablecoin positions, user accounts, and other assets that can be defined digitally and on chain.

At some point in the future, property laws might change to recognize crypto tokens as their own asset class, which would make possible things like having some claim of ownership over a gold bar based on holding a NFT. Many investors today hold gold in their portfolio without it physically being transferred to them. Instead, ownership of the assets is recorded on some ledger, which could be a public ledger.

Mattereum is working in this space, trying to tokenize gold bullion, wine[1], and recently real estate[2] with legal warranty, but I would not put much stock in this idea until there is more clarity from lawmakers.

[1] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220624005079/en/IG-...

[2] https://www.businesswire.com/news/home/20220731005030/en/Mat...

[coconuthacker42]

what i dont get is that how can the people who want blockchain adoption not see that their decentralised currency is no good if its in-gates are controlled by a few very centralised companies?

[676234e117]

In the current electronic fiat system, a few companies control both the gates and the network. Crypto at the moment decentralizes the control of the network, which is already a step forward.

Crypto can also be used to decentralize control of the gates, such as allowing goods services and taxes to be paid in USDC and DAI, so that there is less need to use a CEX. But there are regulatory and technical barriers that prevent this from happening right now. The people who want blockchain adoption ideally would like to see those barriers to be overcome.