The blockchain. A strange thing to say when Bitcoin is nearing $8k each, but I'm not interested in cryptocurrencies as an abstract store of value based on the fever of the market.
By now, however, I really thought someone would have found a use for the blockchain as the underpinning of some kind of new app or tech that would be able to create real value for bitcoin or whichever crypto they built it on.
However, we just haven't seen that. We have a lot of gambling, a lot of whales moving the waters, and a lot of irrational exuberance.
But no solid tech. It's still early, but I haven't even heard of anything in the works that really knocks my boots off. All in all, I'm glad people are getting rich (although my hunch is that most getting rich were so to begin with), but so far the tech part of it all has been a big disappointment.
I guess other than finding a way to make space heaters that generate money. That's pretty cool.
Hmm, have you heard of SingularityNET? There are plenty of projects being made that have real, valuable uses for blockchain tech. Marketplaces are one of them. If you want an app store that isn't controlled by one corporation that can force you play by their arbitrary rules, blockchain can allow this to happen. A centralized front-end is necessary, but that's all it is, a front-end. They have pretty much zero incentive to play hardball with the customers.
You're right that most of it is over-inflated hype. But to say the technology is useless is a stretch.
But what percentage of systems is actually ONLY implementable using a block-chain-based cryptocurrency?
I love decentralisation as much as the next guy but it's not a feature. Apart from the obvious authority-circumvention (both positive and negative), what killer features do these systems have?
All the interesting projects I've seen for ethereum rely on Intel SGX to bring ground truth about the real world onto the chain.
In the case of SingularityNET, AI agents are accessible and composable. They can interact with other agents, or act in unison to form larger, more complex agents. The market incentivizes development and maturity of both the system and the individual agents. This is a killer feature if you ask me. There will be a great number of already-useful agents available upon launch of SingularityNET, to kick-start the service's ability to provide tangible value.
However, you're right that most of these projects fail to deliver any value. Many projects are riding the hype-train, and many more are outright scams. However, the example I named is none of those.
Edit: I should add that a big problem of centralized markets is that nobody wants to put all of their eggs in one basket. Take Second Life for example: In SL, your digital avatar and assets are siloed into that world. You cannot transfer them to the next great virtual world. This is conceptually similar to the standardization debates. Anyone can make their own protocol, but if there are profit motives behind one, the industry will be reluctant to adopt. Standardization takes a lot of time, trust, and debate. And for good reason!
With decentralized marketplaces, standards are not quite as important. An implementation can be as fluid as an app, and the cost of replacing one interface/implementation with another is much lower than the cost of standardization. The internal workings of the marketplace itself can be altered with a democratic vote.
This is all theoretical, we have yet to see these ideas produce real returns. But the killer feature is that people have more incentives to invest their resources toward adopting the platform, and that itself is a tangible value, as long as the adoption of the platform itself creates value in other ways.
When you have a need to establish some business procedure between different parties that do not trust each other, smart contracts might be very useful. No other database is able to provide guarantees/features comparable to the public blockchain in that respect. A trust model of most modern databases just do not comply with "everyone trusts noone" principle.
About relying on Intel SGX. Yes, blockchain oracle to be trusted needs to be run in some kind of protected environment. So what? It doesn't imply that technology is useless. I would say, we have a synergy of different security technologies to get really impressive results.
> The rules help protect the privacy and security of end users
The rules are for one thing and one thing only: To maximize the price per share of the company. This correlates with privacy and security, but only because the market has eliminated the players that do not provide security and privacy for users. But even then, there is plenty of evidence that your data is not secure or private, in the hands of tech giants. The definition of security is itself subjective and contextual.
What the market does not eliminate (yet), are companies that abuse their power once they have it. Google dropped "Don't Be Evil" and backed it up with actions that aren't quite so benevolent. Although other services such as DuckDuckGo have launched, to try to compete, the market ultimately did not change. If this were to happen in a decentralized blockchain service, the back-end would be fully transparent. Therefore, the end users could have easily chosen another engine which is built upon that same back-end, rather than a fully watered down version that tries to reinvent the billion-dollar wheel on a sub-million-dollar budget.
2017 was the biggest year for blockchain by a huge margin by many metrics (see https://coinmarketcap.com/charts/). there is now 200 billion dollars in this space, give it another year or two. Some things will shake out for sure, probably a lot of it, but many efforts will lead to production applications.
That's the thing. Blockchain tech is still pretty early stage in terms of reaching the general consumer. Yes, Bitcoin has been around for 8+ years now, but it takes a damn long time for a brand new type of technology to mature and work out the kinks. Ethereum has only been around for about 3 (2014).
It's easy to look at the space right now and see that it isn't currently viable, but that sentiment completely ignores the passage of time and the fact that we are moving towards the goal of general applicability.
Yes, there will probably be a 2000's style shakeout of all the failed or mislead or me-too attempts, but the fact that there are so many projects popping up should tell you that we are still trying to figure out what we can and should do with blockchain.
> I guess other than finding a way to make space heaters that generate money. That's pretty cool.
That's the fundamental flaw in the blockchain, IMHO. The amount of resources in terms of computing and electricity you need to verify transactions at scale is ridiculous. Nobody's going to bother with that unless there's a serious payoff involved.
I find it helps to mentally replace the word 'blockchain' with 'triple entry accounting.' You don't expect much groundbreaking tech work to come from something like triple entry accounting.
While it's just a Chromium with an integrated ad blocker + no-track, I think their curated publisher model might change the online ad industry for the better!
I'm not sure the Brave concept really needs blockchain - it could be implemented far more easily with a centralised DB. To be honest it looks like yet another ICO cashgrab
Well, what are you looking for? There's lots of tech developments happening in the bitcoin space, from mimblewimble to lightning to confidential assets & zero knowledge proofs. But it sounds like none of this is what you had in mind?
So, payments? There's plenty of work being done on that. See: lightning.
"Market" and "market cap" are two different things. The market cap of a currency is inversely driven by the velocity of money, which for bitcoin is quite low. The "market" (cap) of the US dollar is in the trillions even by low conservative estimates.
IMO, the killer app for cryptocurrency is going to be open bazaar. What is open bazaar? Simply put - it is a peer to peer decentralized market place. Think of a something like amazon except no fees to sell, no restriction on what you can sell and powered by bitcoin. Right now the software does not work fully because the only crypto you can use it bitcoin which currently has high fees. The devs are going o switch to using bitcoin cash which has low transaction fees (pennies per transaction).
I have bought and sold items on open bazaar when it was working and it works flawlessly. The buying and selling experience is by far the best I've had. Since there are no fees (other than transaction fees charged by BTC/BCH) you can make more profit compared to selling on ebay/amazon.
have you looked into IPFS/Filecoin and still view distributed storage as overhyped? or just havent looked that hard into the different ideas that are out there?
First: I love the idea behind IPFS and decentralized storage and I'm sure there will be some valid use cases.
But: There's already tech available enabling these very use cases (see https://webtorrent.io/) and the adoption is pretty low. Plus IPFS doesn't solve the problem of disappearing peers at all. If no one's willing to mirror your awesome IPFS page, it will be gone the same way as with centralized hosting.
By now, however, I really thought someone would have found a use for the blockchain as the underpinning of some kind of new app or tech that would be able to create real value for bitcoin or whichever crypto they built it on.
However, we just haven't seen that. We have a lot of gambling, a lot of whales moving the waters, and a lot of irrational exuberance.
But no solid tech. It's still early, but I haven't even heard of anything in the works that really knocks my boots off. All in all, I'm glad people are getting rich (although my hunch is that most getting rich were so to begin with), but so far the tech part of it all has been a big disappointment.
I guess other than finding a way to make space heaters that generate money. That's pretty cool.