First of all, the hype of different blockchains has garnered attention. People who fall into the hype hasnāt learned about the financial literacy and the risks of investing into those.
When Axie Infinity became popular in my country, influencers have started promoting the game and so-called scholarship, which is to refer to a new player. Within a few months of playing, people lost money. Influencers havenāt spoken about the players losing money.
Remember, investment into such blockchains carries a risk. Those are called the digital Ponzi scheme by some people.
I AM NOT SHILLING CRYPTO IN ANY WAY OKAY THANK YOU
With that out of the way, those are not intrinsic qualities of either. The fundamentals on which every shitcoin and the bored ape garbage were sold to the public are still very strong. This is like saying āonline shopping is horribleā in 2004 - technically not incorrect, but very shortsighted. While the proof of work protocol (mining for it to function and who mines more is the truth) is unsustainable, proof of stake (who holds more is the truth) and mixed ones are fundamentally amazing. Imagine stablecoins pegged to indexes of international currencies. BRICS coin, for example. With smart contracts (rules built into the transaction itself) and being practically legitimate international currencies it opens up so many possibilities. Transparency and easy comparisons in payments - salaries, rents, goods and services. Immutability - you canāt just whack a person and steal the deed to their house. The āchainā part of blockchain - clear history of ownership of assets, no more āI accidentally bought a stolen car/houseā. And eventually the contracts can be made complex enough to cover most interpersonal transactions.
And the same thing for nfts. Especially now, in the rapidly exploding era of unethical AI art, music, etc. Artists could easily sell/lease rights for their work, including for it to be a basis for generative models. Itās not limited to digital products - whatever you want to to confirm ownership of can be tagged with one-way encrypted signatures baked into nfts.
So both are great technologies that can still be improved on a lot. But itās just that the ways in which theyāre used today are almost exclusively rugpull bubble dogshit.
I thought the same as you about the exciting technological fundamentals before realising that it was unfortunately also very overblown.
Basically Blockchain technology is a solution in search of a problem. It was invented by someone who was convinced that decentralised currency would realise the ancap utopia. In order make it mainstream, people have been trying very hard to find better use cases and it turns out that you always end up concluding that the centralised approach is always better.
Proof of stake could make the thing not too environmentally damaging but itās been years that major blockchains are saying they will implement it the next year. And again, the use cases would remain weak in the end
There are other cryptographic mechanisms at play, which are amazingly interesting but it is not going to revolutionise the internet since itās already being used everywhere (for example asymmetrical keys).
I gave a number of real life use cases where it would solve real problems. There are so many more, especially āboringā ones like official documents, research, and medical records that would benefit from it tremendously. Blockchain does not equal crypto, but they complement each other really well.
Proof of stake could make the thing not too environmentally damaging but itās been years that major blockchains are saying they will implement it the next year
What do you mean, Ethereum is pos.
I sort of understood the premise for chain-of-custody style use cases, but the other side of the coin is that these usually, or always, have a final arbiter of validity. Typically itās a court system or an end purchaser who decides if the data is valid.
For example, an obvious use case is ārecord a will or deed on the blockchain, cryptographically signed and timestamped, to eliminate any disputes about ownership.ā Except the same problem is trivially solved by a scheme where I could register my will/deed with the legal system itself, which is already pretty good at storing documents, and no need to cart around a big, heavy blockchain. Most of the problems in that space come from spotty, inconsistent record keeping (why arenāt these documents centrally registered in the US?) and more centralization solves them.
Thatās why the fixation on decentralization is often a waste. I suspect the real appeal is fear of human institutions. A banking or legal system subject to laws and social norms might refuse to honour the documents you file, but soulless decentralized code will dance as itās told to. For example, I could imagine wiring a smart contract triggered to irrevocably pay on the event of someoneās death, while writing āhitman feesā in the memo of a paper cheque probably raises a few eyebrows at the bank.
There are so many more, especially āboringā ones like official documents, research, and medical records
I doubt this. With crypto, the ledger needs to be repeated multiple multiple times, itās incredibly wasteful. Thereās no improvement over a central server.
What do you mean, Ethereum is pos.
I think itās super dangerous to take the developersā word on their product. Probably itās literally POS, but Iām not gonna believe all the hype without a disinterested confirmation.
the DPRK would disagree š
This, Iād say that the fact crypto has a clear role to play in subverting and undermining the westās totalitarian chokehold on trade and finance (particularly between nations) fully redeems it.
exept it doesnt, all crypto markets are almost entirely controlled not only by the west but by the exact same people and institutions that controlled similar thing before. crypto is completely and utterly useless except as vehicle for speculation, there does not exits a use case where better technologies didnt already exits.
Not āfullyā. Maybe āsomewhatā .
Thereās a political solution being discussed by the brics that involves currencies of multiple governments, and/or commodities, instead of burning energy for the sake of speculation.
https://thefinancialanalyst.net/2024/05/16/brics-eyes-the-unit-for-decentralized-finance-by-2025/ https://en.sputniknews.africa/20240513/1066527607.html https://www.nasdaq.com/articles/how-would-a-new-brics-currency-affect-the-us-dollar-updated-2024 https://www.reuters.com/markets/currencies/what-is-brics-currency-could-one-be-adopted-2023-08-23/
Unless youāre trying to avoid a legal obligation or get around paying for something that its illegal for you to purchase there really isnāt any point in messing with crypto currency.
NFTās and crypto currency speculation are just high risk gambles. Either the assets are being flipped in pump n dump schemes or money laundering and if youāre seeing ads about āget in now and get rich quick!ā that NFT/crypto market is just looking for bag holders to pay off early āinvestorsā.
Blockchain is a very brute force attempt to make an anonymized customer transaction system somewhat more trustworthy but its slow, expensive, and once a mistake is made it is transmitted to every ledger in the system. āRealize somethingās wrong and want to go back and fix it?ā Well, too bad, either the mistake is now permanent or you fork that particular blockchain ledger and hope there arenāt any more mistakes.
Smart contracts are dangerous as fuck. Write a contract wrong? Welp, its permanent now. Does it have executable code? Wellā¦ we hope its not malicious because the only way to get rid of it is to kill that whole blockchain project and start from scratchā¦ which nukes everything, not just poorly/maliciously written contract. The law of the land is āenter into a contract at your own riskā with no oversight and no way to recover damages if youāre a legitimately wronged party.
In the end, all of the problems that crypto speculators and blockchain proponents try to solve just winds up bringing them back to a centrally governed non-digital currency system that removes much of the anonymity that made it easier to pay for things that are designated as āillegalā. The original point of crypto currency.
