[htkibar]

This is extremely pessimistic. Same comment could have been made ages ago about internet businesses as well.

The issue is that there is significant amount of money in the space, relatively little regulation making it attractive to scammers. It will be solved.

I sincerely hope people stop investing in things because it is crypto. However, investing in a good project with decent chance for the future will bring along a healthy ecosystem; coupled with a bit more of a decent regulation around it.

[iLoveOncall]

I can't understand why people keep comparing internet and blockchain.

Nobody would compare a heavily constrained MySQL and the Internet, why it is any different for blockchain? It's at most that, a (bad) piece of software that allows you to store data in a convoluted way.

It's not a business, not a business model, not a revenue source, it's a piece of technology.

[htkibar]

It is an ecosystem by this point which does store value as things stand. That is different than MySQL.

Once it matures enough to merge with the “real world” so to speak possibilities are exciting. For this to happen a lot of regulation and effort is needed not to mention skilled, critical thinking folks from non-crypto world to join and help.

[mw888]

Muh “constraint bad” argument. Constraint on control is the whole point - you don’t even understand the explicit purpose of the thing which you critique.

[jakupovic]

It is a different level business can be done at. Compare business before telephone/fax, contracts had to be signed in person. With internet we can sign remotely, but we still need to trust each other that we are who we say we are. With blockchain we don't trust anyone anything and can prove everything.

[iLoveOncall]

> It is a different level business can be done at. With blockchain we don't trust anyone anything and can prove everything.

No. Anything that is not produced directly on the blockchain cannot be trusted and is not provable. With "proving who you say you are", you cannot prove anything, since you need an off-chain verification saying "Yep this guy is jakupovic because I can see it on his ID".

All you can prove on the blockchain is that someone that has access to the address f9c979ebe8cda1f345b has signed a contract. This doesn't tell you that jakupovic signed, because there is no way to prove on chain that f9c979ebe8cda1f345b is owned by jakupovic. Similarly, there is no on chain way to prove that f9c979ebe8cda1f345b is NOT owned by jakupovic.

Before you bring up having the private key, having the private key means nothing more than "I have the private key". It doesn't mean that the key is really yours, and it doesn't mean that someone else doesn't have the key.

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People have been conned in believing that "This business is using blockchain" is a viable basis for investing into said business. But everyone would laugh if someone said "You should invest in this business because it's using MySQL".

"We use blockchain" is as much a selling point as "We use Swagger". If you believe otherwise, you have been conned.

[jakupovic]

Thank you for describing what I was trying to put forward.

Here if jakupovic == f9c979ebe8cda1f345b then anything signed by f9c979ebe8cda1f345b is the same as being signed by jakupovic in the eye of the law and the blockchain used, also not a lawyer here. For example clicking I agree on an online form is the same as signing a contract, but neither of these can really prove the person "signing" is really who they say they are unless someone is sitting there checking their ID during the signing. This ID checking part is the crypto land promise and not currently possible with tech we have, short of someone sitting there.

[iLoveOncall]

You must have misread what I wrote because your answer proves (something that blockchains can't do) that you haven't understood.

> Here if jakupovic == f9c979ebe8cda1f345b

This is the first point you are getting wrong. There is NO WAY to prove that jakupovic == f9c979ebe8cda1f345b.

The only thing you may be able to lawfully prove, if you are yourself jakupovic, is that you have the private key for f9c979ebe8cda1f345b. You can also lawfully prove that you are jakupovic, because you have an official ID that says so. But there is NO WAY for the blockchain to link your official ID to your private key, because your official ID is not issued on chain.

> then anything signed by f9c979ebe8cda1f345b is the same as being signed by jakupovic in the eye of the law and the blockchain used

The first point is wrong anyway, but thinking that your blockchain has any legal weight is simply laughable.

Otherwise it would mean that if I somehow gain access to your private key, and sign a contract saying that your house, an off chain entity, is now mine.

> This ID checking part is the crypto land promise and not currently possible with tech we have, short of someone sitting there.

Well that's funny because if you use DocuSign you will be connected to someone that will verify your official ID, and verify that it matches your face. Same when I opened my bank account online, I got put on a call and had to show my ID. So it is absolutely possible with the tech we have, and it is already heavily used.

> For example clicking I agree on an online form is the same as signing a contract, but neither of these can really prove the person "signing" is really who they say they are unless someone is sitting there checking their ID during the signing.

As explained above, blockchain doesn't solve that. Blockchain literally does not solve anything, because it cannot prove anything that did not originate on chain, and the only things that originate on chain are tokens, which themselves have no value outside of the blockchain.

[jakupovic]

You go through all this trouble to prove that blockchain is useless and yet keep coming up with examples where it's useful. Too much to respond to but this point: "Well that's funny because if you use DocuSign you will be connected to someone that will verify your official ID, and verify that it matches your face." Here you describe "Docusign chain" which does have the property of linking ID to public id/key and is useful.

But it's better that Docusign describe their use of blockchains, since 2015, in their words https://www.docusign.com/products/blockchain. Pretty sure that invalidates your conclusion, too, "As explained above, blockchain doesn't solve that. Blockchain literally does not solve anything"

[Nextgrid]

What would be a "good project" though? The way I see it, smart contracts have no power on the real world and thus always require a centralized entity to sync real-world state with blockchain state.

Not only is it not always possible (what if the blockchain states that a certain house belongs to X, but Y is currently living in it - do you have the legal authority and/or a team of goons to forcibly kick out the current occupier?), but it throws away most of the advantages of using a blockchain if a centralized entity is ultimately responsible for applying (or not applying) the blockchain's wishes.

At that point, why not just run a database, thus no longer being a "crypto" project.

There are legitimate businesses that can be done all on-chain but I find the space to be very tiny. There's only so much people can do entirely on-chain (as most business, not to mention people, live in the real world). Even something like sports betting would require an oracle to feed real-world sports results into the blockchain for the betting smart contract to do its work, at which point the oracle can just run the betting site directly (and publish data augmented by Merkle trees if transparency is desired).

[htkibar]

Trusting an entity is different than trusting the specific process / people within it etc. not to mention being able to create an ecosystem.

Crypto by this point is a type of platform so to speak. Actions are verifiable; and of course you need to interact with the real world. However; this doesn’t mean you have to say fuck it; just trust fully.

If we can limit the parts we need to trust; idea of auditing / verifying etc. also becomes easier. I no longer need to trust what the bank will do to let me have a transaction for example; even though I may need to trust them to verify my ID. Off the top of my head, “Are they being racist about giving me a loan?” becomes as simple as “can I get onboarded without prejudice (obviously need auditing) and is their system to allow me to get a loan look at my race (verifiable based on code.).”

I know it is popular to hate on this at the moment however as far as democratising finance and access to it goes crypto is a marvellous tool. Both sides just need to realise that the correct answer is a combination of two worlds, not either or.