I could write a bunch of words to explain why a non-financial pivot isn’t technically possible, but instead I’ll just ask this: “if the blockchain is so useful, why hasn’t anyone done anything with it beyond Ponzi schemes and fraud?”
When it was actually spendable without huge fees, and before any sane person thought of it as an investment vehicle, Bitcoin had a killer app: Poker and probably fair online gambling. That, however, did not fly with certain governments who didn't want to declare crypto a "thing of value," let alone a currency, but needed to in order to control and tax offshore and onshore gaming. Once you can't spend it on entertainment and it lost its function as a medium of quick exchange, it lost most of its reason for existing. That just happened to coincide with the deluge of suckers who wanted to hodl it. Source: I built a startup Bitcoin gaming site in 2011.
Technically your git repo is a blockchain. Those are pretty useful.
I hear that darknet markets tend to use cryptocoins. Which while probably mostly illegal, isn't a Ponzi scheme and isn't (necessarily, depending on what's being sold) fraud.
> Technically your git repo is a blockchain. Those are pretty useful.
Only if you have a wildly incorrect view of what a blockchain is.
Merkle trees are part of a blockchain, but they are not blockchains on their own. What you’re missing here is that blockchains also include something to determine which branch is the correct one, to protect against double spend attacks. This is why “blockchain” gets a different name rather than just being called Merkle trees.
This is being downvoted, but it hits the point on the head. The differentiating feature of blockchains is removing the reliance on social capital from a technical system. While interesting from a theoretical PoV, it's mostly an answer begging for a question when you consider that social capital is still the driving force in each level of the stack except the technical level.
I saw a guy brag about swinging from altcoin to altcoin making a profit but then talks down Monero because "hard criminals" use it.
I thought that Monero at least served some purpose as a currency even if it goes against the wishes of some countries' governments. The fact that there are people that talk down cryptocurrencies that are actually being used as a currency really put things into perspective.
It's just multi level marketing schemes all the way down.
A merkle tree is distinguished from a blockchain (as the distributed part is effectively removed).
Amusingly enough the darknet use of crypto may only be possible because of the Ponzi-beginnings. Criminals are unlikely to accept Pokémons as currency until after they see others doing it.
Git is called a distributed VCS for a reason. And a blockchain is of course a Merkle tree. This part of the basic ideas behind crypto-coins is useful without doubt. But that's not the point.
The actual interesting and novel thing about crypto-coins was solving the "trust problem" of a distributed ledger. But this solution, to be honest, is quite clumsy: PoW. But nobody ever found a better solution until now. Any other proposal is kind of centralized somewhere.
The question that needs to be asked is now "Do we really want, or even need, a fully decentralized 'value moving system'"?
In a world where you could ultimately trust someone else the answer would be clearly "no".
But when there is on thing to learn about humans than it's "never ever trust someone ultimately as you're going to be scammed by those people eventually". Just look at what government do around the globe…
As long as this fact doesn't change (and it won't change until we create a new species of intelligent beings, better than us) there will be room for something like BitCoin. And as those are distributed systems there even doesn't need to be any agreement on that point.
The Bitcoin is the scam. Its "price" grows only due to Ponzi con men involved. By design it is not suited to be used for anything on scale but the Ponzi schemes. It can't be a substitution for money even if it claims to be. Its number of transactions per time unit is very limited. It's not a solution for fast "double spending" resolution as one doesn't know when the consensus can be final. The technology is on another side unsuited for small scale deployment because then the "proof of work" is small enough that it whoever wants can indeed overpower more than 50% of the rest but using more computers, even from the cloud.
And then there is what we do know about what happens in practice:
"We found a proliferation of press releases, white papers, and persuasively written articles," Burg et al wrote on Thursday. "However, we found no documentation or evidence of the results blockchain was purported to have achieved in these claims. We also did not find lessons learned or practical insights, as are available for other technologies in development."
"Blockchains are typically public, their contents transparent to anyone with an internet connection, but the one behind Excelsior Pass will be private, meaning only parties sanctioned by IBM will be able to check the contents."
But the blockchain is the protocol for updating the information where other players aren't trusted. As soon as any "party" can be "sanctioned to be able" there's just no need for blockchain at all. It's just selling of snake oil, and yes, IBM is indeed doing it.
Now who'd expect that? The technology company uses the hyped technologies to sell their services and products, even if the said technologies don't make the products any better?
I've read somewhere that banks use blockchain internally. I mean levels of trust can be different within a company. Maybe you don't want anybody to be able to modify the ledger's history.
If you were a bank or a set of banks and just "don't want anybody to be able to modify the ledger's history" and you know what you are doing, you actually don't want to use blockchain. Because blockchain doesn't mean "nobody can modify the the ledger's history". It means "for it we have to use "proof of work"". But the "proof of work" means "whoever has 51% of the computing power can take over all".
Of course, blockchain promoters would tell you that "there will be something else, comes Really Soon (tm) which won't use "proof of work"."
One can more efficiently use public key cryptography, hashing and signing without the blockchain for any other problem than "implementing bitcoin."
The usual use case isn't intra-company controls but replacing the clearinghouse / inter-bank settlement layer. This still does seem like a potential actual use for a blockchain, but "we can replace ACH" gets you maybe a couple hundred million at most, and for a lot of work. Easier to just scam people.
