They were desperately waiting for you to figure those enough promises and now that AI has dominated the narrative, they’ve either skunk off to try and get in on that, or finally just cut their losses and tried to rebuild their ruined lives.
Out of those I only know blockchain being used in spain as a way to ensure legality of accounting books, and that business are not commiting fraud by deleting invoices. Not in a public ledger or anything, just a hashed chain that they need to send to irs equivalent.
AI has taken the spotlight, but this is a good thing.
Also, NFTs. Wasn’t there a supposed use case for contract authenticity or something?
It’s still out there and going amazing!!! Despite the lack of mainstream media coverage, blockchain and smart contacts couldn’t be doing better.
On an unrelated topic, does anyone want to buy some NFTs? I can give you a really good deal. No take-backs, though.
Blockchain is just a ledger. Most systems don’t need a ledger, they need a database. It was a solution looking for a problem in most cases and the marketing/business types don’t listen to the engineers if the engineers are even in the room.
AI became the new buzzword
Vaporware turns out to be vapor. Shocking.
trackerware corporations couldn’t maintain their monetization stranglehold
AI is the new crypto, crypto still here but its largely used by shady people and conservatives love to invest in a scam, because they play it like its stock, but its easier to understand and less convoluted than a stock, buys, puts,whatever. the threat of CRYPTO has largely faded into background.
With the recent payment provider shenanigans I wonder if crypto could somehow have its revival among normal people.
Turned out that those in control of the tech could control the tech, so contrary to the hype nothing was free, decentralized and scalable. Never.
The money behind the hype went into “AI” instead
I’ve also heard the theory before that even GPUs went pretty much straight from mining cryptocurrencies to then be used for training LLM models.
So whenever there’s a new tech innovation, there are two instances of it.
The first is the actual tech innovation, that often finds a specific use in a few industries, then just becomes part of how things are.
The second is the venture capitalist innovation. It has nothing to do with the technical stuff (as long as the tech is complex enough to impress the average 5th grader). It’s more a concept or an idea, and a lot of big promises of unending potential. And as soon as the potential is there, stock prices go up. And that’s the only point.
The second one blows up big, then deflates quietly when the next thing takes everyone’s attention away. The actual tech innovation usually just finds its niche and quietly chugs away.
Any time anybody talks about a “tech revolution” or some similar word vomit, they’re presenting the second thing. Currently we’re on “AI” (i.e. LLMs), which will become a niche novelty when the next big thing comes along (I give it a few more years).
Currently we’re on “AI” (i.e. LLMs), which will become a niche novelty when the next big thing comes along (I give it a few more years).
I think llms are overhyped. But at the same time, their two main uses are “better google” and porn, both of which I would hardly describe as “niche”.
They’re here to stay. But things are ridiculous with every chat app adding AI companions or jetpack for wordpress begging me to generate an AI image
From what I’ve heard, the biggest problem is the inputs. You can write a ‘smart’ contract that says ‘if I get a pizza, user9000005 pays user30000004 XXX bitcoins’ but there’s no direct sensor for ‘user9000005 has a pizza.’ Someone has to manually put it in. At that point, it’s not automated. It’s just a payment processor with way less certainty, so why bother?
Why less certainty? It’s more certain and less censorable than any other digital payment method.
It’s harder to doctor, but that’s not really the big worry with a contract. Contract disputes are usually more along the lines of ‘he didn’t pay me’ or ‘she didn’t deliver the goods.’ It’s much rarer for it to be an ‘I signed a contract that said BLAH, but they forged a contract to say BLAGH and faked my signature on it.’ As for censorship, I’m not sure what you mean. A government would find it difficult to obscure an on-chain contract but that’s also not really an issue. I don’t want to guess what you mean.
You’re thinking on a very narrow definition of a contract, here’s a simple contract example that’s currently being censored and wouldn’t be censorable on Blockchain: Buy NSFW games.
A simple contract could sell you NFTs for game keys that could be redeemed on Steam/Itch/GoG or even the own dev site. So there’s no middleman who could oppose this transaction and say which sort of games can or can’t be sold. This whole thing would be completely automated, secure for every part and non-censorable.
You’re hearing contracts and thinking on paper legal documents, whereas smart contracts usually refer to programs acting on tokens, the code that acts on those tokens is the contract, in the example above the generation and transfer of the tokens would be the contract.
Exhanges can still ban specific users.
So? Just use another exchange, that’s the same as saying paper money is bad because pawn shops might ban specific users.
Its the same problem; any regulation is likely to occur at an exchange level. Successful exchanges will eventually buy out the unsuccessful ones.
They require enough capital to run that they are centralized rather than decentralized. They need to be trusted by users. Its very obvious they’re the weak link here.
Yeah, there’s this whole concept of “Oracles”, which were supposed to be trustable sources for facts, but they can mainly deal well with things like stock prices or weather data.
It would also have been possible for these Oracles to employ people to fact-check things in case of a dispute. So, user30000004 might claim that the pizza has been delivered and wants their money for it, while user9000005 says nothing got delivered, so then you have someone physically drive out to user9000005 and see if there’s pizza there or not.
But yeah, you still have the problem that a pizza isn’t hard to hide/eat, so you’d need to do some expensive detective work to try to figure out the truth. And that just isn’t worth the cost…
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It’s actively transforming global agriculture. While the USA failed to innovate Canada has integrated blockchain into it’s agricultural sector to facilitate unparalleled traceability.
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Blockchain transactions are painfully slow compared to other payment processers. BTC is only 7 transactions a second. VISA handles 65,000 transactions per second. That’s one of the major reasons we’re not seeing more widespread adoption.
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Crypto currency isn’t backed by a nation’s GDP; which is effectively the mechanism that gives money value. However USA just passed laws recategorizing crypto issuers as financial institutions; that must comply with regulations such as having a % of their liabilities(crypto) as collateral (Cash). So we shall see where things go.
Canada didn’t integrate blockchain into agriculture on a whole. The article you linked was a pilot study.
VISA handles 65,000 transactions per second. That’s one of the major reasons we’re not seeing more widespread adoption.
I thought they were gonna fix that by running a bunch of bar tabs
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Expensive and useless. Decentralization was an illusion and they don’t solve any real problems
Tell that to itch.io and Steam - the latest victims of centralized payments systems.
To my knowlege, unless we completely abandon traditional currency, we still have the same problem. You still need 3rd party payment processors and/or currency exchanges, which have the ability to act as gatekeepers - esspecially since the libertarian markets promoted by crypto tend to end up monopolised eventually.
If Steam still accepted Bitcoin they could use that, unfortunately Bitcoin has been crippled and has been unusable as a currency for years (which is why Steam removed it from the store). No one but Steam and the end user could censor what gets bought, so it’s a problem that it’s literally impossible to happen with cryptocurrency as money, that is exactly the problem they solve, except people usually don’t care about this problem so they think it doesn’t solve anything.
To call it useless is just untrue. There are many possibilities, Crypto is just a black hole eating the hype and funding that would otherwise go into valuable tech
