[elijahmoses]

Personally, I don't think Crypto is dead, since their are many applications for blockchain in our world going forward.

Nevertheless, I feel the initial hype of making quick money from Crypto has definitely died, because many lost money in the Crypto bull market.

[hawthornio]

What applications of blockchain do you envision? I have not yet encountered a use that is better served by blockchain than, for example, an append-only DB.

[philippz]

Without giving you a monologue, I'll give you some food for thought in a very few statements.

1. The internet you know today allowed people to connect and share information globally.

2. Over the years, we've found value in digital things and may, thus, call them assets: e.g., data, media, and information/knowledge.

3. We have no way to deal with digital assets, which has implications and inefficiencies. DRM was a symptom & soft way to deal with this problem.

4. While the internet connects globally, it is not made to reflect ownership on a global level. Real ownership either doesn't exist or is not transparent. And while privacy is important, ownership should at least be cryptographically provable.

5. Blockchains do not aim to replace the internet or your database; they are a layer on top of the internet, giving us a new foundation to rethink and rebuild how we deal with digital value creation.

In some way, it will bring humanity closer on a global level.

On top of that, there are many philosophic, societal, and idealistic ideas. A lot of them require or trigger a systemic change—many of them we might never see happening, at least not in our lifetime.

If you want to learn more, you need to dig in.

[56friends]

> we've found value in digital things and may, thus, call them assets: e.g., data, media, and information/knowledge

> We have no way to deal with digital assets

Are you writing an ad for a new crypto platform that is definitely not a scam?

There are literally people on the Internet who are able to deal with data, media, information and knowledge without ever touching crypto. Amazing, right?

[philippz]

Eh no, I'm giving you, step by step, a reason why we need blockchains.

[phpnode]

You wrote a lot of words but did not answer the question

[philippz]

Because the question needs to be revised. It is not about what you can do with an append only database vs. blockchain. That's not reflecting its purpose.

[phpnode]

Ok, please could you list some tangible, practical and cost effective use cases for blockchain that are not better solved with other technologies?

[philippz]

* Insurances (e.g. your travel insurance) are contracts. They should be digital, standardized, on a public ledger, so that I can travel anywhere and prove that I have one instead of having to bring, a fakeable piece of paper.

* If I resell my phone, transfering the remaining guarantee and/or insurance should be nothing else then a transaction. On the blockchain that's 10x more efficient than the status quo.

* If an artist sells his art the first time for $10, and the person resells it for 10000$, then the artist should be compensated too. Royalty mechanisms can solve for that and avoid secondary markets or at least create a more beneficial secondary.

There are an endless amount of examples which will make a lot of things more efficient, transparent and enforce standardization on a global level. Long way to go, but absolutely worth it.

[JumpCrisscross]

This dodging is fodder for folks who seek to ban crypto, or at least ring fence it from the money and banking system.

[bdcravens]

It's preferable where there's a reason to distrust a custodian of the data. Of course, most of the use cases dreamed up don't fit that description, and much of the hype may have eroded confidence in the term.

[pelasaco]

There are lot of documents to proof document identity, for instance, notaries in Brazil: https://finbold.com/brazil-authenticates-156k-documents-via-...

[Oxidation]

What does a blockchain bring to that process that signing a document with a normal public-private key pair does not?

[latchkey]

Who holds the private key, the end user or a centralized entity?

[Oxidation]

Presumably the equivalent to the Brazilian notary blockchain would be a centralised entity (in this case, probably Growth Tech[1], or perhaps the central government or a key sharing scheme between the both of them), since that's a private permissioned blockchain.

[1]: https://growthtech.com.br

[latchkey]

IMHO, the whole private permission based blockchain thing is just a poor attempt at a very slow database. This concept really hasn't caught on, primarily because of the centralized aspects.

While we are very far way from this concept in the real world, I'd prefer my proof of identity documents to live on something that isn't controlled by any single entity other than myself. Sure makes them a lot more difficult to revoke or modify without my consent.

[RestlessMind]

> What applications of blockchain do you envision?

"digital store of value" which is: not controlled by any centralized entity and thus immune to corruption of the said entity, easily transferable, fungible, easy to divide into sub-units. I have compiled various usage examples of such a technology here[1], but primarily it boils down to "shitty governments", which covers a vast portion of humanity.

Traditionally, this was Gold but BTC is better at transfers than Gold. Maintenance burden is lighter for BTC on the one hand because you just have to memorize 12 words, but it is also susceptible to hacks on the other hand compared to Gold.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095

[D13Fd]

Except gold has intrinsic value, and cryptocurrency has none.

[RestlessMind]

> gold has intrinsic value

Gold market cap is >12T$, which is nowhere close to its actual intrinsic value. A lot of that market cap is due to the collective myth we have bought into that Gold is a store of value.

If you don't see that, then probably you also won't be able to see the usecase of BTC. Moreover, if you do not see a need for a store of value in general (which is totally based on collective myths and less so on actual intrinsic values), then you are probably in a cute bubble somewhere.

[anonymouskimmer]

When consortia of industries are trying to convince third parties that the information on their append-only DB is reliable. So basically marketing.

[Karunamon]

Name any append only DB with uptime equivalent to any crypto blockchain network.

[xcvbjbhvfgx]

for the same out of pocket price? every single one of them!

heck even paying 5 lawyers to work in shifts around the clock taking calls and updating a local excell sheet is cheaper with better uptime

[lrvick]

They can handle 5 transactions a second while constantly providing proof to millions of users that the data has not and can not be tampered with, even if you bribe or threaten all 5 lawyers? Those are some superhuman lawyers.

[anonymouskimmer]

> while constantly providing proof to millions of users that the data has not and can not be tampered with

The BNB Beacon Chain doesn't sync: https://datafinnovation.medium.com/bnb-beacon-chain-not-a-bl...

[lrvick]

Remittance, anonymous payments, proof of authorship, decentralized DNS, international financial contract enforcement, provably fair gambling, immutable digital asset ownership, publicly accountable donations... just off the top of my head.

It takes little imagination to see many use cases for a computing system that no single party can control. It is the difference in a dictatorship vs a democracy.

[reedjosh]

I don't know why you're downvoted.

My company literally does Remittance using Crypto and business is booming.

And I completely agree with the other uses.

Those downvoting, mind at least providing some arguments with those votes?

[hesdeadjim]

How do you reconcile these statements against a 51% attack that is already possible with Bitcoin? Decentralized? Hardly.

[lrvick]

If 51% of US politicians all decided the value of the US dollar should become 0, then it would be so... and yet it is still a representative democracy which is a decentralized form of governance.

This is unlikely to happen, because it would be to no ones advantage. Even if they did most of the public would likely just ignore the decision.

https://www.crypto51.app/ covers this question in regards to cryptoassets.

It will cost something like $1m/hour to attack Bitcoin, but to even do that you would already need to actually convince 51% of miners to light their profits on fire for no reason.

Even under a very expensive and sustained attack the users of Bitcoin that wish it to have value would simply distribute a blocklist for the compromised nodes and carry on with the 49% that wish for the network to continue as well.

[anonymouskimmer]

> "If 51% of US politicians all decided the value of the US dollar should become 0, then it would be so..."

You don't understand how things work in the US. There are multiple checks and balances. And if push truly came to shove enough of those politicians would be assassinated to make it 49% (dear FBI: this is a hypothetical as to what a few members of the public would do, not what I, personally, would do). Good luck assassinating a Sybiled validation node.

> "This is unlikely to happen, because it would be to no ones advantage."

No one who has bought in to the protocol. But of advantage to an entity that wants a particular protocol to fail.

> "Even under a very expensive and sustained attack the users of Bitcoin that wish it to have value would simply distribute a blocklist for the compromised nodes and carry on with the 49% that wish for the network to continue as well."

Yes, you'd get a forced split. Can you guarantee that the 51% attacker couldn't gradually hop back on and attack again?

[lrvick]

> Good luck assassinating a Sybiled validation node.

No need. We distribute it on an IP blocklist and carry on, just like we handle bad actors on other decentralized systems like email.

Remember that chain splits have happened before and the minority chain and those that agree with its rules and history continue on. Eth Classic is still a thing.

Modern Eth was literally an -intentional- 51% attack to erase a hack. The majority agreed to erase that and on the main ETH network, it became so.

> No one who has bought in to the protocol. But of advantage to an entity that wants a particular protocol to fail.

Once again, we can easily detect and block nodes that are repeatedly trying to lie. It would be annoying, but so is dealing with spam. This is inevitable but manageable and without violence I may add.

> Yes, you'd get a forced split. Can you guarantee that the 51% attacker couldn't gradually hop back on and attack again?

The community could ban all of their nodes and assign higher trust to nodes that did not participate. Any fullnodes that agree they are on a fraudulent chain could agree to go back to the minority chain.

If it happened often we would get better at doing this quickly.

In short, you can temporarily disrupt the Bitcoin network with enough money, but you will never be able to stop those that wish to continue maintaining an honest history.

[reedjosh]

Possible does not mean likely or easy.

Bitcoin is by far the most secure and decentralized crypto to date.

If you have ideas on how to build an even more decentralized or secure money, then please do so. Regardless, there is definitely need for money outside of the control of centralized actors.

[hesdeadjim]

I want crypto to die in a fire. It is 100% a Ponzi scheme with no real world use case. If there was a use, we would have seen something useful come out of the Etherium project by now — other than a demonstration that majority group consensus can rewrite an “immutable” ledger.

[yokoprime]

I have yet to see an application of crypto where it’s not just solving a solved problem in a more convoluted manner. We have had digital certificates for decades which works efficiently to establish validation through digital signatures. Most use cases presented by blockchain enthusiasts competes with solutions based off of simple digital signatures.

[RestlessMind]

I have compiled a list of BTC usecases here[1]. Can you please provide me an already available alternative for those examples, which is clearly superior to BTC?

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32406095

[latchkey]

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26238410

[bdcravens]

For better or worse, the period of hype tends to come back (typically in the months after Bitcoin's 4 year halving cycle)

[himinlomax]

By "going forward," do you mean that no one has come up with one just yet?

[Yoric]

So maybe we're going to see actually useful applications? Until now, it's unclear if there were any because anything that wasn't a ponzi scheme was drowned under the lure of free money.