I think it's interesting to standardize these things as ERC20 tokens. It's still very early days, but that allows you to leverage the entire ETH econsystem which is still growing. For example, I could store those ERC20 tokens on my hardware wallet, or phone wallet, send them to others without using a platform's website, etc.

Also, your comment reminds me somewhat of the infamous Hacker News comment when Dropbox posted ("everything you want to do can be done simply with rsync"). Sure, perhaps it's simple for tech folks that know how to build a database and a website that lets you mint and share tokens. But what if you are a popular Youtube vlogger? You either don't know how to do that, don't have time to, or don't want to spend the money. But perhaps you'd use this service, quickly mint tokens, give them away to users, and invent interesting use cases for them.

Personally, I love this idea and think it has great potential. Will anything useful come of it? Who knows -- it's early days. I think the most interesting use cases, if they exist, haven't been thought of yet. I look forward to seeing what people do with it.

There are two parts:

- Is the idea interesting ? Yes possibly. The idea of making it easy to create tokens is interesting. I can see twitch streamers giving away tokens to their subscribers / viewers.

- Does it need to be on blockchain ? For all the use cases described, the answer according to me is no. It is easier to simply have a frontend through which users can interact vs maintaining a wallet, installing metamask, etc. This is going in the direction opposite of the Dropbox example - making things harder for users.

It’s harder now but it’s going to get there! You gotta believe! We’re chasing something interesting and hoping we can keep making it easier and more useful. Right now, we do know it’s harder and people are still choosing to try it for fun! I agree with all your feedback above though and it’s actually really helpful to keep those realities in mind.

Everything about the way ETH and all this other drivel gets evangelized reeks of some sort of baseless fanaticism.

Is this Carlos from Bitconnect?

“Bitcoin / blockchain is still young”. No it isn’t it is more than 10 years old. An eternity in the tech world.

“Let me compare bitcoin / blockchain doubters to all doubters of some successful technology“. The fact that there were naysayers for some successful tech does not prove that there being naysayers for bitcoin/blockchain means that it will be a success.

Your reply is identical to every scammer and crooked shyster in the crypto space. YCombinator is damaging it’s brand associating with scams.

The sooner this blockchain nonsense crashes, the better...

That’s a question I have too. I don’t want to forcibly put anything on the blockchain. I’m specifically curious about use cases where the decentralization, scarcity, and smart contract pieces of this can become useful. I can’t predict exactly what, but I do think those things will be used for interesting projects and our tools will keep making that easier for people to play with. We’ve listed a few examples of things people are doing above. But right now, I agree that in many ways this is less functional than a database. Right now people use it for fun, and to try out the technology for new things.

> USD 0.5-1 per transaction

This is absolutely not true. Gas prices have been floating between 1 and 4 gwei for a while now. An erc20 token tx may cost 150k gas so between .00015 and .0006 ETH per tx. So that's $0.09 to $0.37. A simple ETH tx is 25k gas so about a 1/6 of this. You can check ethgasstation.info for the latest standard and "safe low" gas prices.

So do you pay to post a comment on HN? Normal people will never hold an ethereum wallet and pay for transactions.

There will be plenty of people willing to pay to convey a message, it's the entire field of advertising.

No one pays to "convey a message". People pay for advertising to access an audience. As soon as HN started charging to post comments most people would stop posting. If they charged to post a submission the quality of the links would drop through the floor. The idea that HN has enough value that people would pay to comment here (while other free websites exist) is nonsense.

HN comments are free but the platform is owned by YC and YC enforces certain rules as they see fit. In Ethereum there is no owner, but looks like you have to pay for that

The entire value of HN is that it’s owned, guided and actively moderated by YC.

An Ethereum-based alternative would lose that aspect while also costing money and being very slow. I can’t imagine paying for what is effectively negative value.

The test for blockchain “dApps” is this: is someone so desperate to have thing X decentralized that they’ll pay for it in both real money and usability inconvenience? If so, it’s a dApp candidate.

In the real world, the only thing that seems to pass this test is some types of inter-company ledgers.

I'm no saying that HN is bad and Ethereum is good. For one thing, here I am posting on HN, so it's pretty telling :)

I just wanted to highlight the difference and that that HN is not free. It's free as in beer.

As far as inconvenience goes, it's temporary. Give it some time (2-5 years, I'd say) and it's only going to be about paying real money for it.

And if you think that EOS is decentralized, and that it will ever see the light of day, then even paying money won't be a thing for the users as they have a different business model for dApps, where the dApp owner has to stake EOS coins to get a share of EOS network's resources. Which is more similar to existing business model of renting EC2 servers

Simple answer, your centralized database can go away tomorrow, or be arbitrarily modified. That can’t happen with the blockchain.

This is only useful if the bits are useful independently of the creators. For example, the gaming streamer, hiphop, and Discord tokens would be valueless without the promises of merchandise, giveaways, and upvotes.

How would this be different than the person issuing your Hexel-based tokens disappearing? The value is still tied to the single issuer.

The person receiving the token isn't the customer, the issuer is.

As an issuer, you do not have to worry about Hexel dissapearing. Presumably, the website doesn't make this clear.

Right, the comment I replied to was saying that the issuer keeping a database and not doing any blockchain stuff had the risk that the database could disappear.

The Hexel model doesn't seem to fix that. The issuer could still disappear, leaving the end user with a bunch of Hexel-tokens that can't be used anywhere.

Is this a real problem? Databases have been handling massive volume of transactions for decades.

Allow people to make copies and backups of the database. This way they'll re-host if the server goes away and they'll be able to detect any tempering.

For bonus point sight the backups with a PGP key and issue sha-256 checksums of your database (itself already containing previous checksums) this way you can call it a blockchain and get all the hype for free.

I've heard about a thing called backups. If arbitrary modifications is your concern, you could hash a certain state or records for easy checks. Also, secure logging is an easy way to record changes.

I don't say that the blockchain is useless, but it's hard to come up with use cases where it's clearly superior than databases.

Any single time you don't want a central entity to control modifications and or the safety of those backups. Voting records immediately spring to mind. Any sort of civic spending and accounting also immediately comes to mind.

Those use cases are in almost all of the blockchain 101-s, do you know any site or gallery where legit uses are collected?

those aren't legit use cases?

Evangelism that embraces hyperbole while demonstrating ignorance does little to further adoption of nascent technologies.

Does that happen to your databases a lot? That's just bad engineering.

That's not the troubling case.

The troubling case is the company hosting the DB shutting down, and therefore the entire system becoming worthless. This is what prevents you as the customer from trusting such a system.

That is preventing you to trust a system where "a gaming streamer is rewarding his most loyal viewers with tokens they store in their own database and you can redeem for shoutouts or merchandise."?

I would somehow think that the database technology is quite secondary to the creditworthiness of the gaming streamer when people decide whether to trust or not a token system of a gaming streamer.

It's the streamer who's trust you need. Whether they have their patron's trust is a separate issue.

but this is what exports are for. I would be fine if gmail etc. shut down tomorrow. there's no reason to add a massive overhead to everything just to solve an already-solved problem.

What if it’s not a massive overhead? What if the tooling is as simple as setting up a database nowadays, and the performance is a known/acceptable trade off?

Surely you can see there are some advantages of blockchain based tech then?

It's just a bit more effort. All companies sell convenience.

Can't win a free ETH if you use a simple database.

Haha, well actually we could do that regardless. The purpose of the giveaway is to source more ideas for what people actually want to do with cryptocurrencies, and to make sure our product can serve those use cases.

All of the examples you gave don’t need a decentralised cryptocurrency and I reckon could be done more easily with a regular database.

Unless you can give a reason why those examples require decentralisation then, as much as I respect your attempt at finding an actual use for decentralised Merkel trees, I ultimately think it’s doomed to failure.

I can offer a few reasons, but they might not convince you. Tokens are provably scarce, meaning the supply is limited and can't be changed by the creator of the currency. They're easily exchangeable, which means they can move between platforms and communities. Finally, they can interact with smart contracts, meaning people can enforce the way the token behaves.

I'm actually interested if you can think of a reason too. This is an incredibly difficult brainstorming exercise. So many ICO's have failed to justify their use-cases, but tokens are so interesting that I have to believe there are good reasons to use them. Is there any case that you do find particularly helpful?

If you think your users are smart enough to figure out all you've mentioned, then they are smart enough to use databases for their usecases.

I think there are lots of people out there that can come up with interesting use cases, without being software developers and not wanting to learn about databases. If something like this can make it easier for more people to be inventive, then I think that is a good thing.

An intermediary solution would be to use a DappChain, which acts as a free-to-use sidechain of Ethereum. Loom is going to be releasing an SDK for their own sidechain, DelegateCall, soon:

https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSdlnBsw1iRAks1F2pD6...

A similar initiative is POA Network, which has US public notaries acting as trusted validators for an Ethereum sidechain:

https://poa.network