[rsynnott]

> The blockchain plan seemed impossible—and that would soon prove to be the case.

As is tradition.

(Did any company _ever_ launch anything borderline successful with The Almighty Blockchain(TM) that wasn't just some sort of token?)

[kiicia]

Bloclchain is still an answer to question no one knows

[wlll]

I knew a guy who was trying to launch a DAO backed space based solar company. I'm pretty sure it went absolutely no-where.

[roomey]

That was a book as far as I know. Daniel Suarez's critical mass.

If it was done in real life too I'm actually at the point where I think that guy is a prophet ;)

[samatman]

The purpose of a blockchain is digital scarcity. If the application doesn't need digital scarcity, it doesn't need a blockchain.

So yes, if you exclude the use case for a blockchain, there aren't a lot of blockchain use cases left. But what have you actually accomplished by structuring the question this way?

[rsynnott]

At one time, it was extremely fashionable to say "use a blockchain for [random thing]", and much VC funding was ploughed into it. As far as I can see, it all came to naught.

[nicholasbraker]

Quant does. But next to that, anything blockchain is rife with scams and solutions searching for a problem..

[pavlov]

> "Did any company _ever_ launch anything borderline successful with The Almighty Blockchain(TM) that wasn't just some sort of token?"

No. But that only makes the goal more alluring:

"We could be the first company to make this work and unlock the untold riches of Blockchain as foretold by prophecy and the iron will of cryptographic destiny!"

Enough venture capitalists seem to have the faith too, to keep the money flowing despite lack of traction.

Blockchain is really the Philosopher's Stone for people who believe software is some kind of alchemy.

[corytheboyd]

> Enough venture capitalists seem to have the faith too, to keep the money flowing despite lack of traction.

They only need to win once. When you’re the chip leader, you can afford to throw down some big bets and lose.

[yieldcrv]

The answer to your question is yes, but you didn’t notice because there was no token, the answer to your next question is no, it probably doesn’t match your definition of success and it doesn’t matter that you weren’t the market for it

as the point is that tokens are very effective advertising engines

[HideousKojima]

Silk Road? But as far as legal things go I'm drawing a blank.

[rsynnott]

That's more using cryptocurrency. It didn't run on a blockchain or anything.

[hanniabu]

Farcaster

[rsynnott]

Does anyone... use this? Is there even a clear description of what it _is_ anywhere? It looks like it's probably an alternative to ActivityPub or that Bluesky thing, but the descriptions all seem very... hype-y.

In any event, I'm not sure that I'd call this successful, precisely. Might be in the future, who knows, can't on a cursory look find anything concrete about usership. But isn't now.

(Also, personally I would not have named a social network thingy over a fake transport system run by evil computers, but that's just me.)

[hanniabu]

I know many that migrate to this from twitter

It's a protocol. There's frontends like warpcast that emulate twitter and flink which emulates reddit

[throw4847285]

I've never heard of it, but I love that there's another startup named after a malevolent technology from fantasy or science fiction.