The Rise of Whatever

I think there's a decent chance that folks on the fringes find interesting uses for immutable and programmable distributed ledgers, even if the prevailing culture of crypto is hellish.

I keep hearing this theory, that “eventually” we will find the use cases for distributed ledgers, and I don’t buy it. Bitcoin was invented at roughly the same time as the iPhone, and the iPhone immediately found use cases. Right away the global economy reoriented itself around the smartphone, because it demonstrated real value to actual people. We did not need to wait and twiddle our fingers for years going “I think there’s a decent chance people find interesting uses for this someday”.

Immutable distributed ledgers, by contrast, have found no use cases other than crime and financial speculation in coming up on twenty years. Exactly how long do we have to wait for these interesting uses that are “surely” coming?

there are many people with many use cases for distributed ledgers. we are already aware of the flowchart of your argument path

“list them”

“oh I can do that in this other convoluted way that doesnt solve any of these users goals or problems”

“I’m not the target audience for that so it doesnt count”

“ah so financial speculation, that doesnt count despite being the largest application and sector on the planet”

“marketcap doesnt matter and isnt indicative of anything in that economy, I would rather hold digital assets at a separate different standard than every other asset on the planet out of total ignorance that my same arguments apply to asset classes that I respect”

“see I proved my point for myself, there is no use case after 17 years, classic HN”

“those are strawman arguments despite all conversations following this same predictable path enough for any language model to regurgitate it verbatim”

A lot of your examples are fallacious arguments that are weak or just generally wrong but your first one is

>”list them”

If you are arguing that something exists, then being asked to prove its existence is table stakes, not poor arguments

You starting with a strong argument in your list of bad arguments and then ending with shit that mocks anyone calling you out makes me believe that you are not discussing this topic in good faith

unfortunately the same thread has been had for any tangentially crypto thread on HN for the last decade and a half, so it just doesn’t feel like my prerogative to answer such a lazy and abstract question

yes, that means we are at an impasse. use the search, ask an LLM, if even that is too much initiative for a quite outdated skeptic to take even now then I can’t help you

there are hundreds of billions, maybe trillions in volume going through financial services on blockchains and it doesn’t matter if financial services isn’t a sector you care about or are the target audience for, there are people there who will pay to solve problems they have

Most of the financial services and systems are all still on very boring old databases (hell quite some cobol still touches a ton of it). Since well they don't need to get hype funding for their Series A or whatever. Databases are just pretty good and processing data efficiently. It's a tiny tiny part that actually runs on some blockchain.