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Read all about it at the above link. There’s way too much to process here. This is going to be wild.
As a niche technology that very few people would otherwise know exists and even fewer would know how to use, but can be surprisingly effective if implemented properly? It’s ok.
It’s in a weird position where it’s best as very anti-consumer or very pro-consumer implementations.
For example, digital concert or sports tickets sell out to scalpers almost immediately. If they were issued via blockchain and invalidated if resold again it would be extremely difficult for scalpers to continue (like, having to sell a whole physical device or spoof private keys or something). This would eventually make the practice die out, and people could just buy tickets to things without an artificially inflated market.
Conversely, an audio and/or video codec could prevent “unauthorized” devices from playing digital media they aren’t “authorized” to play. This would have quite the impact on the complexity of media piracy. Similar to Steam some time ago, this makes paying money for things easier than pirating again, but is extremely prone to said corporations misbehaving.
There’s also more complex possibilities, like digitizing municipal voting or permanent record keeping on private chains. Most people get confused about these and without a technology and cryptography background, and realistically at least some background in social services or macro logistics, the average person only has scammers and finance bro wannabees to learn from. That goes exactly as well as you’d expect.
It’s actually not bad as a currency. It’s just bad because everyone and their mother rely on mining and pyramid get-rich-quick schemes and about 99.9% of finance bros don’t have a single fucking idea how a blockchain actually works.
Money is just made up in the first place. If instead you mean using it as an efficient way to represent allocating specific physical resources, perhaps. In the upcoming dystopian apocalypse where people still have to go work meaningless jobs to survive while the search burns around them, perhaps using a blockchain for ‘fuel points’ and ‘drinkable water points’ or something makes sense.
But as a general purpose currency it seems needlessly complex, and we already have a needlessly complex financial system. Changing the complexity doesn’t solve enough problems to be worth it.
I’m partial to Nano as the most practical currency implementation. Feeless, instant, decentralized. But only in theory, I’m not actually invested or anything. Monero seems relatively cool too.
It sounds cool but seems to suffer from bitcoin’s flaws? Namely fungibility and all your financial records are in the clear. With monero nobody knows how much you hold or what your transactions are. With Morero coins can’t be “tainted”.
Yeah the privacy aspect of Monero is definitely superior.
I think the fungibility of Nano is actually great, I believe the coins can be divided to 12 decimal places or something. Unless I’m misunderstanding what fungibility means.
The Nano use case is similar to cash, it’s easy and fast, but I agree that it’s not really useful for major financial transactions. More like buying a cup of coffee for someone across the world with no fees and instant transaction time.
Bitcoin always promised something like that, but in reality there are massive fees and transactions take forever to complete, so it’s just not fit for purpose.
I more mean that you can tell a coin is tainted, it’s not fully fungible. If a coin has ever been used in illicit trade, it can be known and some institutions won’t accept them. That makes some coins worth more than others. It’s not a nice property of a currency to know the full history of a unit of currency.
As a currency? Yes please. Kill it all.
As a niche technology that very few people would otherwise know exists and even fewer would know how to use, but can be surprisingly effective if implemented properly? It’s ok.
Block chain is still a really cool solution in search of a problem to solve. Money wasn’t it. NFTs isn’t it. What is? Sports betting, maybe?
It’s in a weird position where it’s best as very anti-consumer or very pro-consumer implementations.
For example, digital concert or sports tickets sell out to scalpers almost immediately. If they were issued via blockchain and invalidated if resold again it would be extremely difficult for scalpers to continue (like, having to sell a whole physical device or spoof private keys or something). This would eventually make the practice die out, and people could just buy tickets to things without an artificially inflated market.
Conversely, an audio and/or video codec could prevent “unauthorized” devices from playing digital media they aren’t “authorized” to play. This would have quite the impact on the complexity of media piracy. Similar to Steam some time ago, this makes paying money for things easier than pirating again, but is extremely prone to said corporations misbehaving.
There’s also more complex possibilities, like digitizing municipal voting or permanent record keeping on private chains. Most people get confused about these and without a technology and cryptography background, and realistically at least some background in social services or macro logistics, the average person only has scammers and finance bro wannabees to learn from. That goes exactly as well as you’d expect.
It’s actually not bad as a currency. It’s just bad because everyone and their mother rely on mining and pyramid get-rich-quick schemes and about 99.9% of finance bros don’t have a single fucking idea how a blockchain actually works.
Money is just made up in the first place. If instead you mean using it as an efficient way to represent allocating specific physical resources, perhaps. In the upcoming dystopian apocalypse where people still have to go work meaningless jobs to survive while the search burns around them, perhaps using a blockchain for ‘fuel points’ and ‘drinkable water points’ or something makes sense.
But as a general purpose currency it seems needlessly complex, and we already have a needlessly complex financial system. Changing the complexity doesn’t solve enough problems to be worth it.
As a currency is where it shines, monero is really the only decent implementation. 98% are cash grabs
Nah. At least not as a replacement for USD any time in the near future.
I’m partial to Nano as the most practical currency implementation. Feeless, instant, decentralized. But only in theory, I’m not actually invested or anything. Monero seems relatively cool too.
It sounds cool but seems to suffer from bitcoin’s flaws? Namely fungibility and all your financial records are in the clear. With monero nobody knows how much you hold or what your transactions are. With Morero coins can’t be “tainted”.
Yeah the privacy aspect of Monero is definitely superior.
I think the fungibility of Nano is actually great, I believe the coins can be divided to 12 decimal places or something. Unless I’m misunderstanding what fungibility means.
The Nano use case is similar to cash, it’s easy and fast, but I agree that it’s not really useful for major financial transactions. More like buying a cup of coffee for someone across the world with no fees and instant transaction time.
Bitcoin always promised something like that, but in reality there are massive fees and transactions take forever to complete, so it’s just not fit for purpose.
I more mean that you can tell a coin is tainted, it’s not fully fungible. If a coin has ever been used in illicit trade, it can be known and some institutions won’t accept them. That makes some coins worth more than others. It’s not a nice property of a currency to know the full history of a unit of currency.
I see. Thanks for the explanation