With all the activity, you'd think by now there would be some famous, impressive solutions to real-world problems that could not have been solved "the old way" (i.e. trusting a central body).
NFTs are obviously hugely successful, in some way, but that seems to be largely a variation on the same old speculation game.
I realise there are serious uses of cryptocurrency beyond speculation, such as international money transfer or bypassing unstable fiat currencies, but I am more interested in the revolution in distributed apps and online services that we are supposed to be seeing.
Where is it? Do I just not know where to look?
Really look forward for the day where I can buy stocks there. In my perspective the user experience is so much better. You own your "tkns". You don't need a broker or whatever to get access to an exchange. It works 24/7. Especially would be useful for people without bank access. By the way trading volume is already huge there.
person -> brokage -> market makers (hft) -> exchange
So my point is, I think in terms of fees it may be more expensive, since you can't interact directly with the exchange. Also try to transfer your assets from one broker to an other. Not always trivial.
Nothing similar exists on Uniswap, it's cool for people who know what they're doing, it's terrible for everyone else.
The guard-rails can be built in the new medium, and the result may actually be better than what we had before.
Also you have the risk that they might get hacked (although coinbase seems to be very secure).
IMO the project aims to solve a couple fundamental problems:
- Graphical computing power is prohibitively expensive
- Graphical computing power is inherently scarce and inaccessible, while most graphics resources are in reality sitting idle.
- Thermal/power constraints are incompatible with a mass-market form factor for VR/AR/XR.
Looking past the shilling in this tweetstorm I think it's the best summary of the core concepts I've seen: https://twitter.com/arbvision/status/1460774216136024071
[edit: appended "open standards" above]
> As video games get more photo realistic (...) the demand for rendering is going to grow immensely.
I don't see what a decentralized render farm has to do with video games, it's never going to render at real-time rates.
Personally I'd think a bit broader than frame-streaming for achieving "console in the room" levels of video game fidelity.
I think that over the next decade or so this will become the greatest impact of blockchains outside of finance.
This isn't to say DAOs aren't useful - but it would be nice to see a concrete value proposition. Like "that thing which people want to do, like in example X, can be done significantly cheaper/faster/more conveniently than the current way to do it."
I think, maybe obviously, that more distributed organizations stand to benefit more immediately from being a DAO than more centralized traditional corporations do. For example if a bunch of cabbies want to run their own homebrewed clone of Uber / Lyft (As cabbies in some cities actually do), a well-programmed DAO could save the group hundreds of thousands of dollars that would normally be spend on servers and staff to maintain them. Essentially, smaller distributed organizations can be freed of the need for centralized touch points and thus the costs associated.
The post is asking - what are the real things being done. They will likely be done by new companies to be sure, but it doesn't change the question.
A prediction market could solve that, cheaply build consensus where it would be harder to do otherwise.
If this is the criterion then the answer is going to be "nothing". Because anything a blockchain can do, somebody running 1 server could do. The whole point is to do things just without the central authority part.
This is why I believe that these applications have little use in spaces other than finance. For example, the NYSE is governed by a central entity that acts as a market maker, buying and selling securities to "make" the market. This is all done behind closed doors in a way that the vast majority of people do not understand. A Blockchain-based market maker provides much more transparency and stability than a centralized one governed by human decisions and thus emotions.
However, very few, if any Blockchain projects are truly decentralized as they are still developed and changed by a central organization. We need more projects that are simple, efficient, financial tools that are immutable on the Blockchain that people can use and there is no incentive from a central authority to change the system in order to achieve their goals or boost their profits.
There is no evidence that a Blockchain based approach would provide more transparency or stability. In fact the opposite is likely true.
Here is a talk I gave to Mozilla Privacy Lab back in 2017 about centralization and all of the extremely-concrete evil that has resulted, with every single example from the (long) talk directly cited (as every slide is a news article). And the sad thing is that every few days there is some new high-profile abuse of centralized power that I always feel also deserves to be in an updated version of this talk... it is a never-ending issue as people suck.
So, I feel like your very question of trying to solve things that can't be solved with centralized systems is flawed; hell: I studied decentralized systems in grad school, and I have been saying for as long as I can remember that "anything you solve with a decentralized system I can solve cheaper and faster and better with a centralized one"... but you know what I can't do? I can't solve it in a way that doesn't lead to at least some moral landmines due to my now having chosen to take those shortcuts by having centralized control of the result.
Inherently, then, I believe the reason to work on blockchain stuff is not to solve things that "can't" be solved using centralized systems... it is to figure out how to re-solve the things that people already solved using centralized systems without putting any individual or small cabal in charge of anything that would let them do evil things. And it is then to figure out how to do well enough with what results that people are willing to put up with it probably being a worse result on the surface because it is a better result for humanity.
And like, that's a nearly impossible bar, and maybe to really get there will require regulation of centralized systems to make them illegal... which I realize will probably never happen :(. But that doesn't make working on these systems dumb, the way a lot of people here seem to think: it makes it all the more noble, as everyone who isn't doing this are actively making the world a worse place to live (and in some of the more egregious examples, such as everyone who chooses to work at Apple, have pretty direct blood on their hands from issues in countries like China).
Hell... looking at your comment history, I see you recently being excited about the idea that Google could use their fleet of self-driving cars to create a mass road surveillance network capable of logging the license plates of "bad drivers" (and from thread context, "reporting them")... Google already is used as a stooge for governments (even as they push back, they still provide tons of data) but at least it is almost always about their own users: expanding their charge into watching other people is just evil and will lead to unprecedented ways to abuse this information stockpile :(.
The people have voted with their wallets that buying books from Amazon is better than buying books from a bricks and mortar store. Not everyone needs to agree, but the aggregate has spoken. What is the analogy to Amazon?
A hypothetical, un-compromisable entity would be more effective than any blockchain simply because the entity wouldn't be beholden by the inherent inefficiency of maintaining decentralized consensus.
For ex - Cost of consensus by the govt in a stable democracy is much lower than a failed state. Blockchain could be used there.
Similar to this but it's still too simplistic :
https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fenrg.2021.6711...
It also requires more data points than payments. Since the current solutions aren't better than VISA i don't think it can manage that much data.
