How much would you bet against Facebook attempting to link Bitcoin/BitcoinCash/Etherium wallet addresses to individuals and tracking cryptocurrenct transactions as part of your profile?
https://www.recode.net/2018/5/8/17330226/facebook-reorg-mark...
Platform was marketed as an open marketplace. Once it was sufficiently powerful, Facebook showed its proprietary intent and closed the gates. Same happened with Microsoft. And Twitter. And countless others. Blockchain is just the newest tool for selling proprietary systems as open utopias.
Just speculation obviously, lots of others are trying to figure out a way to do this, but the imposter thing is very real and hard to stop obviously in crypto.
I think this word is now like "hacker" or "AI". It's not completely meaningless -- it does have a kinda-sorta fuzzy meaning. But that meaning is different from what techincal experts mean when using the term and is very much audience dependent.
Using digital signatures in a chain is not a novel idea. Without PoW you do not need the block part, just records.
1. crypto currencies and P2P payments
2. Take clues from Steemit (a decentralized social platform that runs on blockchain) and how they utilize blockchain
3. Use to combat censorship in countries that are not favorable to Facebook
4. Use BC to combat fake news
5. AI platforms
6. Streaming services
Just because they have a centralized service doesn't mean they can use some of their considerable capital and branch out into other areas and offerings. To think FB will always be a social media platform is kind of. . .myopic wouldn't you say?
> 4. Use BC to combat fake news
> 5. AI platforms
> 6. Streaming services
wasn't "the cloud" supposed to do decentralization too? hmm
I'm not sure re-implementing on a blockchain has the same effect, unless they're farming processing out to third-party actors at no cost somehow.
perhaps blockchains can be used to immutably timestamp events like political speeches, to create an authoritative historical record?
> 5. AI platforms
consider the following efforts:
> 6. Streaming services
perhaps content rights could be managed on a blockchain?
also consider this lightning network related effort: https://www.coindesk.com/bitcoin-meets-netflix-laolu-buildin...
So it’s not "combat fake news" but rather "create an authoritative historical record of events’ timestamps". I’m not sure how the blockchain is in any way useful for the latter. I feel like we’re trying to force blockchain into every imaginable field without even thinking about it.
> consider the following efforts
Landings full of buzzwords are not "efforts". Like another commenter pointed out, it’s the whole "let’s do X, except in the cloud" thing all over again.
> perhaps content rights could be managed on a blockchain?
Ditto. "let's do content rights, except in the blockchain".
Not much different from no use cases, at least from where I'm standing.
People compare this to the early 90s of the internet, except even then early internet was EXTREMELY useful, even with the limited access and content.
It would seem we have come full circle.