[Pilottwave]

While I understand where you are coming from, this argument is basically "money attracts attention from scammers". As a counter I would say "Money attracts attention, period" and attention is an important resource to foster growth.

Decentralized tech would never be where it is today if it weren't for investor attention and the potential for gains. We just have to separate the wheat from the chaff, and remain vigilant for bad actors.

[Labo333]

What I mean is that the current signal-to-noise ratio is way too weak.

This created a lot of bubbles. NFTs are already down by a lot, now yield farming (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-04-25/sam-bankm...) just took a big hit from the FTX case. I see way too many "revolutionnary" projects from fresh graduates. There is no way that tens of thousands of inexperienced people with barely enough CS education to pass programming interviews would magically create innovation just because VCs put a ton of money on them.

Also, can you tell me more about where decentralized tech is today? BitTorrent was a revolution as a way of information sharing, Onion was a revolution for privacy and Bitcoin was a revolution for decentralized ledgers.

Starting from that, IPFS is the continuation of BitTorrent with more features and Ethereum is a more efficient (especially since The Merge) and customizable (smart contracts are advanced checkers for write operations) ledger.

But what are the real world applications of those technologies? What are concrete use cases of Ethereum and IPFS besides payments, records and file sharing?

Surely there are exciting progresses to be made on the technical side like zk-SNARKS but how useful will they be to society?

I think we already have all the technical blocks we need. If there is no real-world adoption maybe we should just wait another 10 years before pumping crazy amounts of money.

[2fast4you]

*blockchain tech would never be where it is today…

I’ll bet blockchain is only as popular as it is because of the money. But other forms of decentralization like Mastodon or Matrix are pretty separate from the whole crypto sphere

[dist1ll]

Matrix is separate from the crypto sphere, because it solves a different problem.

Federated platforms appeal to the privacy-oriented "f** big tech" mindset, which is pretty common in the hacker & FOSS crowds. I'd put it in the same category as VPNs, E2E messengers and TOR.

[olivierduval]

VPN are really usefull for business to link different locations with internet instead of using (awfully costly) dedicated link... or to allow remote work

So VPN are not really in the same category

[mikepurvis]

VPN as a technology, yes. But I think "VPN" in this discussion is referring specifically to the myriad of consumer-oriented paid solutions (SurfShark, NordVPN, whatever) that are pitched as being about protecting your online security, pirating with impunity, and bypassing region-locks.

[Labo333]

Totally agree on that.

Big corps only invest in blockchain because of the buzz words that are used as marketing by the consulting firms to sell their "expertise" and by VCs to sell their companies.

Sure they hope to gain some money, like luxury brands wanting to sell to crypto-billionaires. But crypto was a useful toy, then Ponzi scheme and now it's a closed loop. How long will the bubble last?

[sdiacom]

The "chaff" and the bad actors are in it for the money. Without them, "decentralized tech" indeed wouldn't be where it is today -- meaning, it wouldn't be overwhelmingly associated with crypto-adjacent grifts.

The real decentralized tech, the one that serves a purpose other than emptying the wallets of naïve crypto-enthusiasts, does just fine without a profit motive. You don't need get-rich-quick promises to get an audience if you're actually doing something useful.

[ricardobeat]

Where exactly is decentralized tech today?

Nobody around me ever uses any of it. Old p2p networks (gnutella, kademlia, emule) had way larger impact on society 20 years ago.

[blamestross]

BitTorrent isn't getting any smaller. Mainline DHT is still 10x bigger than Bitcoin.

[pmontra]

Email and the web are more decentralized than they look. Just think that different FOSS and closed source user agents and servers interoperate without any problem, especially for email.

[ricardobeat]

They were talking about crypto. Email and the web were born out of research & universities, not the “potential to attract investors”.

[feanaro]

And in non-web space, there's Matrix (https://matrix.org).

[yunohn]

> Decentralized tech would never be where it is today if it weren't for investor attention

That’s exactly why blockchains haven’t found Product Market Fit.

Investors != Users