Ask HN: How aware are you about building decentralised software on blockchain?
Yet what I see with smart contracts on blockchain, such as the Ethereum Virtual Machine, is a huge potential for change and opportunity.
If you don't know what that is:
You can run code on the Ethereum blockchain. The user pays to run your code, instead of you paying to run the server that serves them the code. This is because everyone who's running an Ethereum node actually has a copy of your code in the blockchain.
This is called a "smart contract" but enough people have experimented with it that they've actually built decentralised applications - dApps for short.
There are now real world examples of decentralised applications in Finance - DeFi - which includes a Decentralised exchange - uniswap - and decentralised finance like Compound, Balancer and Yield Finance. So there are apps. You can get a loan from a DeFi app today.
This seems like it has huge disruptive potential. Mark Cuban has talked about how he could sell tickets as NFTs on the blockchain, and get a percentage of resell, forever.
You could in theory build something similar for Airbnb or Uber on the blockchain - just NFT a house/day and then sell it on the blockchain. Same thing with Uber - drivers could auction off their time in a blockchain dApp.
Because devs don't pay to keep their code in the ETH blockchain, you can just build software and it will "run" forever, at no cost to the developer. You can also set up the smart contract to give you a percentage every time it runs - see uniswap. Thus user - pays the dev + network on usage.
This is a radical change and imo a huge avenue for new innovation.
But this is hardly talked about here in HN.
Let's ignore, if possible, the whole "proof of work is bad for the environment" question (all I'll say about that is proof of stake is real and in production with DOT/ALGO and that's a 99% reduction in energy consumption). I know it's tempting to go in this direction but again - let's assume all crypto is proof of stake for the sake of argument.
137 comments
[ 4.7 ms ] story [ 221 ms ] threadAll the use-cases you listed can be done without a Blockchain and in much much more efficient way, even if decentralized.
The fact is that 99% of the perceived uses are simply riding the hype train for investment. The 1% is really changing things, despite all the haters, but it’s typically finance, currency, settlement, etc.
I'm not convinced that centralized is better in every way for the more complex examples, however. I just think the tooling and distribution aren't quite there yet. And sometimes it will take a rethink of the existing application. For example, Uniswap is a great decentralized exchange, but the constant product architecture it used to achieve its result is much different than the standard order book architecture that centralized exchanges use.
We already have software that runs at no cost to the developer. It's called software.
You can run someone else's software and pay for the actual running thereof, it's called installing it on a virtual machine (and things like the AWS Marketplace exist for turn-key solutions). Maybe something "microtransactiony" could happen here - but why would you need a blockchain when AWS can just make "Marketplace for normal people"?
And many of the other solutions provided end up having a central authority, in which case why not just have ... a database? Amusingly enough most crypto exchanges are internally run not on a blockchain but on a database, even though in theory one entirely on a blockchain might be a workable use case.
https://www.coingecko.com/en/coins/usd-coin#markets
And yes, I know, there's the promise of 'a solution to these problems' on the horizon. But this promise will always exist in blockchain, because the investors are arrogant, and incapable of understanding the technology. (and willfully ignorant of such understanding)
They're also federated, but at the cost of being exponentially more expensive to run.
If you have the common data, it's on a central database and the developer is paying for it.
Blockchains give you the common data without the developer paying.
You don't have to run a node to hold coins. A piece of paper can do it.
I don’t care what Mark Cuban thinks, I hardly know who he is beyond being wealthy and liking limelight.
Autodesk will probably get there first, and everyone will pay to use a centralized system instead and then have to export the data to their legacy accounting system.
But, a group of collaborating firms, that still dont quite trust each other, or want to hide certain amounts of profit, are a use case.
http://www.warrenhenke.com/writing/essays/triple-entry-accou...
https://iang.org/papers/triple_entry.html
I find it odd to say "thats a human problem" as if technical invention over centuries isnt specifically to abstract away human inefficiency.
A group of somewhat trusting firms doesnt need crazy PoW/PoS. The idea of companies sharing a collaborative ledger when working together shouldnt be dismissed so flippantly. Everyone keeping their own (unreconciled automatically with each others) book may be the status quo, but it doesnt make it optimal.
Look into Compound, Balancer and MakerDAO.
How does "being your own bank" do these things? My understanding is that you would still need a "regular" banking layer for each of these activities, which seems like it defeats the point?
You have a contract written in software, people pledging money to liquidity pools, and the rest is just magic. Sure you can go to a bank or someone and pay a currency exchange fee, but the fact that its possible P2P is quite neat.
It's basically Banks-as-software, collaboratively maintained like Wikipedia.
Plus I can already do P2P currency exchange. I don't because it's inconvenient to find those to exchange with, so I happen to use a marketplace (TransferWise), and they take a cut because they're providing a useful service and now they're an exchange. Exactly the same will happen with DeFi currency exchange, so how is it better?
It’s better because instead of transfer wise controlling the money from point A to point B and taking a percentage as a fee (0.1% or whatever) you have 10 000 people who build a liquidity pool where the money gets transferred from point A to B. All those 10 000 people share the 0.1% fee. Maybe less, in an extremely competitive space.
Basically all the centralisation, the app takes a fee bullshit goes away, and instead you get 10 000 or 100k or 1mil people all sharing their money and receiving part of the fee.
The dev can also write into the smart contract that he gets paid a percentage as well. Boom, you have a transferwise competitor with 100 mil in liquidity within days with 0 server costs. You can do this right now with a few days/weeks work on a decentralised application. You don’t think that’s big? Any app that “takes a cut” in exchange for having written a few thousand lines of code and maintaining server infrastructure will be challenged by decentralised alternatives.
> you have 10 000 people who build a liquidity pool
> The dev can also write into the smart contract that he gets paid a percentage as well.
This is literally what TransferWise is. They convinced thousands of people to work together to build a liquidity pool – that's the hard part – and then they take a small cut.
Getting a loan on DeFi takes minutes.
There's nothing about regular banking that prevents this, or anything about DeFi that is required to make it happen.
I think you're mistaking the fact that DeFi is a hub of great innovation for DeFi itself being the great innovation.
DeFi might be able to provide this, but we don't need DeFi to get it.
However the fact that it’s confusing doesn’t mean it doesn’t work. Cuban has rightfully said UX in the space is beyond awful - some of it is virtually unusable without deep instruction.
My assumption there would be that you lock that bitcoin away. And you get 150% of the value of the BTC in another coin - DAI or whatever.
So you might have had 1000 usd in BTC but by the end you have 1500usd in DAI ? Dunno
Granted, they're costly if you're poor, but I've yet to see a blockchain application that seems likely to be useful for poor people who may not even have consistent network access.
Payment processors, on other hand, certainly charge vendors and result in some level of markup to the sale price of goods and services. But blockchains as payment processors add cost as well. This just happens to be hidden right now by the fact miners can earn so much profit from the value of their holdings skyrocketing that they don't charge anything. Crypto values have to stabilize at some point to ever be usable for transactions, so this cannot continue forever, and users will eventually need to pay the cost of the transaction processing directly, just as they do with non-blockchain payment processors.
Decentralizing something doesn't make it costless. Some work is being done somewhere by some machine or person.
> poor people who may not even have consistent network access.
There are plenty of poor unbanked people whoe have enough network access to use bitcoin, especially with the lightning network. You only need network access when paying (or receiving). You don't need consistent network access.
>This just happens to be hidden right now by the fact miners can earn so much profit from the value of their holdings skyrocketing that they don't charge anything
That's not true man. Miners are not empowered to charge anything. Miners can only accept transaction fees that users place on their own transactions. Its a market and miners choose the highest fee transactions. That's how it works. You're implying that coinbase rewards subsidize low fees, but you're very wrong about that. When the coinbase rewards go away, fees don't consequently go up - rather miner revenue goes down in such a case.
> Decentralizing something doesn't make it costless
But it can make it orders of magnitude cheaper. Paying someone on the bitcoin lightning network costs less than a tenth of a cent. Tell me that isn't cheaper than any other traditional payment mechanism.
My point is that none of this is actually possible. My employer doesn't pay me in Bitcoin/etc, has no facility to right now, and would get into a lot of legal trouble if they didn't pay payroll taxes. I don't frequent any shops or online services that accept payment with cryptocurrencies. My landlord wants to be paid in GBP because that's what he's paying his mortgage in and he doesn't want the hassle and cost of conversion.
I get that these things are all possible when everyone has moved over to cryptocurrencies, but that's a huge chicken-and-egg problem, and I've yet to see a path from where we are now to this future world that is at all credible/accessible/legal/compliant/safe/cheap.
Except it is possible.. What you mean is that the people who pay you don't want to pay you in bitcoin, and the places you buy from aren't taking bitcoin. But they could if they wanted to. It is in fact possible today.
You asked "how does being your own bank do these things". I think its pretty clear how they do those things and how banks are not necessary for you to pay someone else (in bitcoin) today.
> would get into a lot of legal trouble if they didn't pay payroll taxes
Paying employees in bitcoin does not prevent them from paying payroll taxes...
> huge chicken-and-egg problem
Its really not tho. Individual merchants can (and do) accept bitcoin without all their customers willing or able to pay in bitcoin. Its just another option. Individual employers can offer the option of paying employees in bitcion (especially easy if they're a merchant that accepts bitcoin). Individual employees can opt into such an option. There is no chicken and egg problem, it can happen gradually one person at a time and one company at a time.
Just because DeFI exists, doesn’t mean it solves a problem that anyone actually has in a way that is measurably better than our existing systems.
I get that you’re passionate about this, but you’re simply not selling it. The least appealing thing in the world to me is to “be my own bank”. I hardly want to interact with a bank, let alone be one.
If you're genuinely interested, you can check out my project which tokenizes real estate rental income: http://leasehold.io/
I wrote a detailed article which explains how it works: https://jonathangrosdubois.medium.com/how-leasehold-achieves...
The idea is to use blockchain tokens instead of shares but later we will also allow people to use LSH tokens to pay for rent when staying in one of the properties in our network.
We essentially invented a new concept called 'Proof of Profit' - Imagine if you could have irrefutable proof that a company earned a certain amount of profit in a specific month. Typically you need to trust company financiers and accountants. Not so with Leasehold. If you just launch a node to sync with the blockchain, you can verify the profits yourself with absolute certainty; just by looking at on-chain buybacks for that month. Tell me this isn't innovative and useful.
HN is going to miss the boat. Build more cool stuff. You will become insanely rich, since so many people seem set to let this opportunity go to waste.
The focus on where to buy your token, how much your token is selling for, etc is a major turn off for me. It might not be fair, but my first thought after landing on your website is that it's another ICO that isn't going to go anywhere.
And looking at your token model, users can "see" that Leasehold the company is reinvesting in itself by buying property or buying back shares. This seems very easy to game - what keeps you from just burning some of the "significant" shares that you own to prop up the price / prove that you are receiving income?
Now for a true defi, you can't depend on the physical world (some authority out-there). Only cryptocurrencies are possible in this case, and maybe, if the blockchain becomes advanced enough: Dynamic value derivatives denominated in crypto.
It might sound as limited but money (and the transfer of it) is kinda a huge thing. Crypto's downside is volatility. Being able to hold crypto as crypto while preserving stability (or better: value) will be a game changer. It'll also mean KYC and regulation will be harder to implement.
KYC/regulation/blacklisting are huge tools for governments. Government can have control over centralized entities (ie: an exchange, a bank, etc...) but they can't control everyone's wallet. They might be able to mess with a couple guys or figure out if a certain gang used such and such, but it'll be impossible to track everyone transactions that are happening in the blockchain (worse, the "whole world" is out there). And even worse: Current events have showed that governments are way behind when it comes to blockchain technologies. Some governments are not even aware of its existence or meaning.
In my opinion, this is huge. Most societies/civilizations collapsed when they failed to collect taxes. Peasants (your lovely citizens) are unlikely to pay when given the opportunity. Less taxes means less control, it's a slippery slope. Bad news for many governments around the world.
https://akash.network/
https://akashlytics.com/price-compare
That would mean that for 1.0 CPU on Akashlytics, I would need to pay $13.40/hr versus $4.25/hr on AWS. The cost savings claims on their pricing is deceptive at best since it is not comparing apples to apples.
I don't see how this makes sense unless you are looking for < 1 CPU, but then there are places like Digital Ocean which is likely more cost competitive there as well.
I am totally open to being wrong though as Blockchain seems like something so many smart minds are working on, but the solutions where it makes sense over not using Blockchain have so far not been apparent to me.
So if the user runs an Ethereum node, they have your code too, and then they can run it for free.
What am I missing?
E.g. (1) a bad actor runs an Ethereum node, (2) you ask them to run your code, and (3) instead of running your code, they sell it.
the emergent, more efficient systems will remove the rent seeking behavior, and allow capital to flow more easily. Everything significant in this space is open and infinitely clone-able in many contexts. The only thing that isn't clone-able is value -- we have digital scarcity now in a world of efficiency maximizing code and systems. something about passive rentseeking as damage and routing around it.
> As will become apparent from this exposition, the notion that a “blockchain technology” exists and can be deployed to solve any specific problems is highly dubious.
> It is unworkable for third‐party intermediaries to imagine they could improve their performance by employing a technology that sacrifices efficiency and speed precisely to remove third‐party intermediaries.
> Ethereum can be rolled back means that all blockchains smaller than Bitcoin's are effectively centralized databases under the control of their operators. It turns out code is not really law, because the operators of these contracts can override what the contract executes. Smart contracts have not replaced courts with code, but they have replaced courts with software developers with little experience, knowledge, or accountability in arbitrating.
Do you need a decentralized, trustless, transparent and uncensorable system with adversarial participants and you can boil down your logic to a bunch of if/else conditions and some for-loops? Then blockchain probably makes sense and finance is the best use case so far.
But decentralization comes at a great cost, both in efficiency and actual costs. So do I want to train a ML model in a decentralized way? Probably not. Do I want to put my game on the blockchain where I relinquish any control? Probably not.
The hype means that people are trying to put blockchain into everything which in turn turns off a bunch of people because it doesn't make sense.
First, whenever I work with blockchain, I reach a point where I realize all my technical issues are because I chose that data structure.
The second is that outside of hype, your examples are remarkably poor uses for blockchain. Each can be solved more efficiently and effectively through better technology choices.
Which is more likely?
A) That thousands of progress-minded professional technologists are all wrong and ignorant, as you've suggested above...
Or...
B) That you are wrong, and there are people with huge financial incentives to pump up crypto platforms by misleading people about their capabilities
I'll ask you the same question I've been asking for 5 years without getting a good response:
What is a real pain that a dApp can solve better today than non-blockchain software?
Uber drivers auctioning their time is not one of them, because Uber drivers do want a benefit that's only possible with centralization: vetting/banning of passengers.
Cryptocurrency is a perfect example of how computing experts can also have little to no understanding of finance and economics :). HN has been bearish on cryptocurrency for years, meanwhile the industry is continuously expanding into the territory of trillions of dollars.
HN's take on crypto will be one of the most comical examples in a few years. Decentralized finance alone is already a 100 billion plus dollar industry and growing at 5-10x a year.
Which dApps? How many users are there? And why can't that dApp be built on traditional stacks?
> building real value
Haven't seen any of this yet. I've seen speculation on coins, and then there are many layers of financial products built on top.
The application space is essentially non-existent as a use-case.
This site shows the top DeFi protocols and their locked value in their smart contracts. It's hardly exhaustive but just visiting and researching the top 10 or 15 will be instructive for you.
Axie Infinity the game has hundreds of thousands of users and growing like crazy. Tens of millions at least own some cryptocurrency. Ethereum has more than 1 million active wallet addresses and it's growing on an exponential curve.
https://www.benzinga.com/markets/cryptocurrency/21/07/218240...
You probably haven't seen it because you are following HN and mainstream news and expect to be informed on it through their filter.
The main success stories I would point out are Uniswap, Sushi, Aave, Compound, Maker, Synthetix, Liquity, OpenSea, Rarible, Sandbox, Decentraland, Aavegotchi, Audius, Matcha, Zapper, and more than I can list to be honest. It's a bit like trying to explain all the interesting use cases of the internet to an early dot com skeptic.
The Hn filter is brutal. It might be costing people the opportunity of their lifetime.
The difference is that Dropbox was a prediction about a business model, while the anti-blockchain comments are assessments of a technology.
A lot of the bullish claims about crypto are based on badly misunderstanding the underlying technology. HN is not predicting anything in that case, just debunking misinformation.
> Decentralized finance alone is already a 100 billion plus dollar industry and growing at 5-10x a year.
You're changing the topic. This thread was about decentralized, blockchain-based apps, not about decentralized finance.
You missed option C, that thousands of smart but loud technology professionals speaking outside their area of expertise are wrong, thousands more are right, and it's not as obvious as you're making it out to be.
I'm nearly certain that there are quite a lot of drivers out there who would be willing to forgo this if it meant taking home the huge share of their revenue that's currently going to Uber.
The bigger issue is it's not clear drivers going on the blockchain is even legal. Uber and Lyft provide some minimal vetting and certification. Prior to them, drivers directly owned their own taxi businesses, but needed medallions, which also involved regulatory compliance. Uber and Lyft could get away with operating in legal gray areas because of huge legal departments funded by VCs and stock holders. Can individual drivers do that or will cities just hammer them?
> Can individual drivers do that or will cities just hammer them?
This is a good question. Personally, I think it's a risk that many drivers would be willing to take and that enforcing this sort of law on a per driver basis would prove extremely difficult.
I wholeheartedly disagree. It's not even easy to get a female driver in certain places because they're afraid of riders. And most women would never use a service where the drivers aren't identified, background-checked, and banned upon their first incidence of assault.
But if you're right, where is decentralized Uber? Or decentralized Twitter? Or literally decentralized anything?
All we have right now is tokens.
You can do this using cryptocurrency that's being loaned out to you under the protocols of a decentralised application. No centralised control, everything is automatic, and there are no central servers - you can do all this just by running code as smart contracts on a blockchain.
And you mean "I can get a loan of X amount of money for X amount of collateral, yes."
What use is that to me!? Total horsesh*%t.
This whole thing is the biggest financial joke of our generation.
Yes blockchains are indeed an exciting development and present a lot of potential, but "true" hackers are probably as excited by blockchains as they are by say Rust. The thing is that generally speaking we can have informed conversations about Rust, because those that understand the novelty of Rust have come to that understanding through a genuine interest in the technology, not because of how Rust can make them rich.
So yes, blockchains are indeed very interesting, but unfortunately the conversations around them are overwhelmingly distorted by the superficialities of what I would cynically describe as dilettantes. Of course there are indeed serious hackers doing game-changing work in the blockchain space and I believe blockchain does have a future, but right now it's almost impossible to hear the signal from the noise :/
100%, seeing people who just learned the word blockchain explain to me how I can make 100x my money on crypto is pretty annoying.
My recommendation would be to stick to github, the technical parts of bitcointalk.org and whitepapers at most. Those tend to have better signal to noise ratios.
Because as of today cryptocurrency has not yet reached the point where it makes sense for most merchants to accept payment in cryptocurrency. Because we are still paying other people and entities and the government in fiat and the exchange rates are fluctuating wildly.
And also furthermore in agreement with what you are saying, a lot of the fairweather supporters will be like let’s put this and that on the blockchain, and yet those people have no real understanding of the trade-offs that come with choosing to do so.
Thirdly something that I find annoying is when someone describes proof-of-work as “solving difficult maths problems”. A cryptographic hash is computationally expensive to find a collision for unless it is flawed, true. But the mathematics behind for example SHA-256 are not really “difficult”. It’s just time-consuming. And it has the property of being fast to verify. But to me when someone describes it as solving difficult maths problems it seems probable that they don’t really know at all what is being done.
Having something on the blockchain doesn’t mean it can never be fixed. It’s just data and that data can never be deleted, but it can be amended and superseded.
I have not explored this idea fully, but I think blockchain technology would be a good candidate for something like a community members ledger. Ie, a public list of people that belong to a group.
Based on this ledger then you can derive new ones for individual issues that the members can cast votes on.
This would form the basis for a type of electronic voting.
- UX of interacting with/running code. This isn't users going to a website or downloading an app from an app store. Until it is, it's a non-starter.
- Unsolved side-effects/data input. While "blockchains" are good at reducing the amount of trust needed in a system, for smart contracts to interact with the real world, they still need trust for data input/output. This all seems like it's in very early development.
- Inflexibility of contracts. "Paper" contracts, T&Cs, etc, have an advantage that they work 99% of the time, but that when you hit an edge case that no one has figured out before you can email someone and come to a resolution, or at worst, go to court to have a (hopefully unbiased) third party decide. This is often better for both parties, but is not an option with smart contracts.
- Development risks. Last time I checked smart contracts were written in a language that seemed to be inspired by a combination of C and Javascript. I'm not sure there's a worse way to write code that is so critical. Software engineering is decades ahead of this, safety-critical software engineering is many more decades ahead of that, and contract law is centuries ahead.
I don't know which projects you've used, but in my experience, the DeFi projects I've used have much better UX than any bank I've ever had.
Most of them just have a simple "Connect wallet" button you click and you're in, no need for a password, whatsoever [1]. There are some easy to use wallets like MetaMask, just have to set it up once.
1: For example, https://oasis.app/borrow.
Compared to going to my bank's website and clicking "get a quote for a loan", filling in some personal details, and getting an email?
I understand why this feels exciting to tech-minded people but this essentially proves my point.
I've never had an online loan application work, always had to go to their branch or call them which is a lot more work than installing one browser extension called MetaMask.
A lot of these complaints remind me of the time when all the newspapers were writing about how internet is never gonna succeed because x, y, z[1].
There was a time where email was a "complex" thing, you can find out videos of news anchors trying to understand the "@" [2].
1: https://www.newsweek.com/clifford-stoll-why-web-wont-be-nirv...
2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UlJku_CSyNg
Over time we got companies like AOL, Yahoo, eventually Facebook and Twitter. This is how most people use the web, what these companies offer(ed) is safety, accessibility, consistency, centralisation.
On the early web people knew it was unsafe to just hand over your card details, it took us developments like HTTPS and 3D Secure to make that safe. Right now DeFi is in a similar place, it's a wild-west of technology that has been fraught with hacks and scandals where many have lost a lot of money.
To truly take off it needs to develop that trust, and to develop it in a way that is safe and accessible to all.
I know you can do it safely now, but you need to know what things like hardware wallets are (which are a terrible UX), and even then we've seen hardware wallets being used as an attack vector recently.
Concrete technologies, software architecture and design, algorithms, cryptography etc. are all means to an end. Start with what you want to achieve, what real world problem you want to solve and the people you want to solve it for.
And then work backwards from there.
Smart contracts! Its all absolutely revolutionary -- but also kinda sketchy. I have been playing with various defi protocols on various EVM based chains, and while it makes money (ideally, you are gaining more value by locking up funds in farms, vaults and pools.)
The reality is you are probably either holding a decreasing in value position in a liquidity pool (impermanent loss -- your apples and oranges are worth less in a month, but you end up with more apples and oranges with you withdraw), being issued inflation reward points from a vault (they are printed out of nothing as a reward for locking up funds) or being screwed on deposit, withdraw or 'performance' fees in a pool/farm. Dont get me wrong, there is actual value being created, the trade fees on the Automated Market Making contracts is actually good (eg: ~0.2% per trade * many trades!) It can be much higher than centralized finance can provide at a much highest risk.
While the savvy can use this system to buy more bitcoin (which is happily tokenized on EVM chains and convertible back to good ol' [bitcoin] UTXOs), most will probably just lose fiat value equivalency while increasing their holdings in shittokens, all the while thinking they are growing value.
The most promising value extract routine at the moment looks to be:
* Borrow fiat at low interest rates from cefi (banks)
* Convert fiat into stablecoins
* Deposit stablecoins into lending platforms
* Use stablecoin collateral to borrow at a slightly higher rate (but lower than the bank in step 1)
* Deposit borrowed funds as collateral in more lending platforms
* Repeat borrow until all collateral is consumed (to your own leverage/risk level).
* Deposit in pool/vault and collect 'interest', ideally higher than you are borrowing at.
* Last step probably earns the most of all, and will pay for the rest of the steps
* Profit!
My take on this is that this is just more Wall street fiat money shenanigans, reinvented on public blockchains. Or we could just have hard money -- 21 million coins. No yield, No interest, No inflation of the monetary base, No bs.
I see blockchain being useful in two areas, finance and transport/delivery logistics. Environments where no one trusts each other outside of financial contracts and you need to share information publicly to address faults and concerns without other parties being able to change anything.
The other fundamental problem is connecting the blockchains to the outside world. There are various libraries to help with this, e.g. web3.js for Ethereum, but this typically means most DApps are inward-looking (exchanges, DeFi, token-based games etc.) rather than providing any non-crypto-related functionality. That of course makes it look to many people (rightly or wrongly) that DApps, DeFi, etc. all just serve two functions: (i) "plausible deniability" (look, my cryptocurrency does all this, so it can't just be a pyramid scheme), and (ii) sustain the pyramid schemes (i.e. keep them going for longer, draw more people in etc.).
Relating this to your example of selling a house as an NFT, there was an attempt to do so earlier in the year[1], but the key point is "Whoever purchases the NFT will be able to contact the seller and organize the sale of the house through standard legal means." So if you buy the NFT, you are not buying the house, but buying a brochure with the particulars you'd need to try to actually buy the house. That is the fundamental issue: to do anything useful you still need to interact with the real world. And personally, when it comes to something like buying a house, I'd much rather deal with real people, than hope I don't irreversably lose all my money due to an unfixable bug in the immutable smart contract or someone typing in the wrong address or something.
Anyway, take a look at https://dappradar.com/ for DApp listings.
[0] https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-42237162
[1] https://decrypt.co/66173/a-house-in-germany-is-being-sold-as...
Unlike the Web2 revolution, retail users get to participate and benefit from the value creation. Between social tokens, NFTs, decentralized finance protocols, and DAOs (decentralized organizations), there is now a burgeoning ecosystem of tooling for organizing human capital around a cause or a goal. This goes beyond centralized tooling. It's all open source, it's all forkable, it's creative, it is fresh and reminds me of the early promising days of the internet. It's a chance to get a redo on the promise of the web.
I'm spending my time learning several things in the Ethereum ecosystem. One is using Ethereum for authentication, by using the wallet as a public key login and ENS domains as a user-friendly user name service (effectively acting as a decentralized auth/identity solution).
I'm also learning about IPFS and decentralized data storage through solutions like Filecoin and Arweave. I'm exploring a peer to peer database called ThreadDB.
And I'm studying Solidity and all the tooling for creating and interacting with EVM based smart contracts.
It's a very fascinating space and HN is doing a disservice to itself and its users by not featuring the positive side of it more.
Yes, but in the view of an outsider who at least has some knowledge of what it's trying to accomplish it seems mostly dominated by people running pump and dump schemes, scams, and other activities of ill repute. As such it is hard to see it in a positive light, and in the solution spaces of most businesses blockchain doesn't really fit and is the worst kind of vapourware instead. Worse, a lot of the applications seem to assume a perpetuity of things where there's no clear path of stewardship (decentralized or otherwise) of what happens when people get bored of it or the network stops being able to meet it's intended goals. Most applications of blockchain require people to not be bad actors and exploit the system, unfortunately it seems to have attracted a lot of bad actors.
The only use I've seen that makes any sense is CT (certificate transparency), where it actually fits the model provided by the blockchain concept well. It's my only example of a relatively 'clean' blockchain tied to something useful and practical and helps even people that don't understand it.
People excited around blockchain seem to be excited with the community they created and I don't think that's wrong. However, it is hard for me to see that community worth personally joining when a lot of what you see discussed around blockchain ends up being bots, salespeople, scammers, astroturfers, or the misinformed. It's not inducing the same medium of creativity as lot of other web inventions like forums, flash, mobile apps, etc. It just ends up being about itself which is fine but nets limited interest which makes the negative actors stand out that much more. I'm sure there's pockets of genuine good here and there, but it's hard to see past the dark vile ichor that surrounds everything.
Everything that you’re saying about crypto is (almost) true of the early internet. 99% of the companies then were BS. Crypto is a weird space right now as it’s so void of regulation things that should be illegal are not.
As someone else said, this is the noise. The signal is Ethereum Virtual Machine, dApps and DeFi are real.
Interestingly this post appears to have been removed from HN. Not sure if I did something incorrectly.
You need to host an app or a website that facilitates that. Same for the Airbnb scenario. You'll quickly find that how that transaction works is a relatively small part of operating the platform. You need search, customer support, reviews, recommendations, marketing, analytics. Paying Visa and friends 3% to process payments isn't where your costs or complexity are.
That’s a radical example. But piece by piece blockchains can abstract layers out of the application until you only have your own part of the smart contract.
That doesn't seem like a permanently sustainable business model. Coin values can't keep shooting up forever, and at some point blockchain node owners are going to need to either shut down or directly charge blockchain users, and then you're back to the same situation as normal payment processors.
"Blockchain" isnt a single thing. Bitcoin is definitely peer to peer. Most cryptocurrencies are operated in a peer to peer way.
> It relies on blockchain nodes, which you can run yourself, but mostly people don't do that
Most people not doing it is irrelevant. They can if they want. They can get rid of more middle men if they want. Even using custodial cryptocurrency services get rid of some layers of middlemen and so is still a win.
> and it isn't free to do
Yes it is. There is no substantial cost in running a bitcoin node for example.
> The reason users of the blockchain
There is no such thing as "the blockchain"
> the reason.. users .. don't currently have to pay anything to use ["the blockchain"] is that owners of blockchain nodes earn money by holding coins that appreciate relative to their local legal currency at a sufficiently fast rate that they don't need to charge their users.
You're wrong on many many levels, as I told you in my other comment to you. Please stop trying to explain things that you clearly don't understand.
There are already hints of how this will happen in DeFi. Protocols interact with protocols, smart contracts with smart contracts, until suddenly you get a full stack and the application layer becomes inevitable.
fundamentally in such an environment there's just very little practical use for "decentralised finance" - we have spent millenia creating regulation and trusted (of varying degrees) parties to manage all this stuff and it works well enough compared to any of the "defi" stuff, where almost the entire ecosystem is fraud and pump and dump. and normal people fundamentally seem to like the system where they can't just be frauded without recourse.
if you can provide a way to do the smart contract bit without the toxic hangers-on then I'm sure there's niche uses for it all, but no one ever proposes any compelling argument other than, fundamentally, the proposer will make more money out of it that way.