[gatewaynode]

This. It's not like all innovation that has occurred in the crypto-currency space is useless, there are some real valuable innovations there. Blockchain as a whole is just too tainted to see the forest for the trees in all the greed, specifically the word "blockchain" has become magical and deceptive.

"Having one neutral platform, controlled by no one, with standardized API's and immutable open programs that anyone can permissionlessly build on - is amazing."

Tim is dead on with this observation, this is amazing. And it's not a magic bullet statement either.

[bartread]

> Tim is dead on with this observation, this is amazing.

I'm not saying Tim's wrong, but one of the problems that Ive seen a lot - to the point of being tempted to use the word "constantly" - with blockchain is this sort of gushing rhetoric that actually does a really poor job of explaining why it's amazing, and especially of explaining why it's amazing in a few short paragraphs of jargon-free plain English that anyone with technical background can understand.

Again, Tim's post may be right, but it really falls short here and that's a big problem for the perception of blockchain. Until you can get people to understand why it's valuable, without the answer being to go and spend hours reading when there's perhaps no certainty of what you learn being valuable, it's always going to face this scepticism.

It's not helped by the fact that the scammers and the non-scammers talk about it in the same kind of way, so you end up unable to distinguish the real information from the "blockchain doublespeak" - again, certainly without a lot of research. If you're busy you end up developing a heuristic where you file all of this in the mental waste basket.

[TimJRobinson]

You're right, it is hard to explain. That's why I believe long term it's going to be more like AWS - it will be financial plumbing that firms build upon and most end users won't even know they're using it.

I think a lot of HN doesn't get it because they don't work in finance, but everyone I've talked to who works in finance (or has to deal with their archaic systems) is really excited about the possibilities.

Then again, a lot of people didn't understand the internet or it's jargon in the 90's, so we'll see how it plays out.

[likeabbas]

> I think a lot of HN doesn't get it because they don't work in finance, but everyone I've talked to who works in finance (or has to deal with their archaic systems) is really excited about the possibilities.

The people I've talked to in finance are really excited about Blockchain/DeFi because it's an opportunity for arbitrage in a completely unregulated market.

[oblio]

> You're right, it is hard to explain. That's why I believe long term it's going to be more like AWS - it will be financial plumbing that firms build upon and most end users won't even know they're using it.

It sounds good, but ALL the money needs to be taken out of the ecosystem.

They need to go back to the drawing board and work in silence and fix their core problems: scalability, respecting core financial laws such as AML and KYC, and then they need to present their platform.

The problem with that is that it's fundamental research, making no money, possibly for decades.

Ain't no one got time for that.

[jrek]

Steve Jobs in a university lecture in 1991 (iirc) articulated the vision among him and his industry contemporaries of consumers using thin clients accessing data from the cloud, a reality that took two decades to really come to fruition and that had to wait for infrastructure to catch up - the point being that while some people didn’t see the value of the internet, people in the know were able to simply and quickly articulate beneficial use cases.

[oblio]

Let's drop Steve Jobs as some sort of magic visionary.

If you really want to talk about a true tech visionary, use:

Douglas Engelbart: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Douglas_Engelbart

Mother of All Demos: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

> The 90-minute presentation demonstrated for the first time many of the fundamental elements of modern personal computing: windows, hypertext, graphics, efficient navigation and command input, video conferencing, the computer mouse, word processing, dynamic file linking, revision control, and a collaborative real-time editor.

> December 9, <<<1968>>>

1968, not 1991.

[threeseed]

> Having one neutral platform, controlled by no one, with standardized API's and immutable open programs that anyone can permissionlessly build on - is amazing

It is unquestionably amazing. But it's not the reality.

Most data is not stored on the blockchain but instead in proprietary databases due to the prohibitive cost. And even if it was free the VCs are pushing hard for a defensible moat i.e. lock your users in with proprietary data and features.

We've seen this play out with OpenSea and how its view of NFTs is different from what's on chain.

[miracle2k]

The data that matters is all on-chain: the smart contracts and the balances. This is why what Tim talks about has actually played out, and we have seen incredible composability between different protocols.

> We've seen this play out with OpenSea and how its view of NFTs is different from what's on chain.

If anything, the NFT ecosystem proofs this point. It consists of a dizzying array of aggregators, lending platforms, fractionalization platforms, alternative marketplaces, curation tools, API providers, all interacting with another. The fact that OpenSea retains a large marketshare among marketplaces is true (though now down to 60% - https://dune.com/sealaunch/NFT), but hasn't stopped this interoperability at all. Because in fact, what matters is on-chain, not what OpenSea exposes.

[oblio]

The fact that you use the NFT ecosystem as proof of anything is baffling.

NFT doesn't even store its data.

It's not even a true protocol that mandates things ensuring stability.

You're buying thin air.

[BlueTemplar]

Yeah. You can also argue that Git and IPFS aren't really blockchain, but at some point that's just splitting hairs...

The big question is of course how best to deal with all the scammers in specifically the cryptocurrency space ?