Crypto space if indeed full of scams, due to a poisonous combination of money, hopeful returns, and a degree of anonimity.

But I find the concept of dapps fascinating. I could even make a prediction that early dapps might eventually become the longest continuously "running" programs in the world. The VM is simple enough to maintain and port, and there is an incentive to do so. These "smart contracts" might still be executable centuries later.

> I could even make a prediction that early dapps might eventually become the longest continuously "running" programs in the world.

what do they do? Can you point to some successful use-cases today (other than some kittens) where this might apply?

> These "smart contracts" might still be executable centuries later.

chances are that there is no such thing as the Internet a few centuries later in the same way the Telegraph is pretty much dead today!

> what do they do? Can you point to some successful use-cases today (other than some kittens) where this might apply?

Nitpicking but ain't collectible card games with proof-of-ownership a use case though? In the Magic The Gathering world (for real physical cards) ensuring that thought-after cards are the real thing is an issue. There are brick and mortars grading companies grading the cards. Then you have to trust the seller you're not getting a swapped-in chinese fake.

But another use case I've seen used: fully decentralized messaging, either "pseudonymous" (say tied to a BTC address: there's been a working demo showing on to do this on BTC's lightning network) or fully anonymous messages, using ZK cryptography.

In this case you don't know who send a message to whom. You don't even know if it's a message or an amount transferred.

And if the cryptographic primitives behind that are broken, we would pretty soon know (price would crash).

To me decentralized messaging, fully anonymous using zero-knowledge cryptography primitives, is quite a use case compared to the "we-need-your-phone-number-but-trust-us-our-protocol-and-app-ain't-backdoored-and-we're-not-collecting-any-data" messaging solutions that are out at the moment.

But I agree it's a world obviously full of scam. Still: a blockchain is basically a computer: a very slow and bloated one. But it's also an incredibly correct and very hard to hack computer.

I think there are valid use cases for a fully decentralized computer running advanced cryptographic primitives like zero-knowledge cryptography. To me fully anonymous decentralized messaging is one (and a badly needed one at that). There are probably others.

There are some solid use-cases for this technology beyond currency and collectables. Check out Livepeer [1].

They are creating a p2p network for live video broadcasting infrastructure, essentially a competitor to "AWS Elastic Transcoder" or the GCP equivalent. The thought is that through an automated decentralized auction for transcoding capacity, customers will always get a better price than centralized cloud computing providers. It would be interesting to see this concept applied to general compute capacity as well. I think I read about something like that elsewhere.

[1]: https://github.com/livepeer/

I can’t work out if this is satire or not.

Well most likely any relatively complex piece of software will get updated so we can exclude the current staples like MakerDAO[1] or Uniswap[2]. What would still be used as is would be some kind of basic function (as basic as `ls` or `curl` are to Linux), but given the very assembly language the contracts run on is still being worked on I think we're a little too early for that.

[1]: https://github.com/makerdao/dss

[2]: https://github.com/Uniswap/contracts-vyper

Are there any cryptocurrency dapps that anyone uses that are not novelties, gambling, or cryptocurrency investing (gambling)?

Compound is a lending protocol. Maybe because lending happens in cryptocurrencies you want to classify that as gambling — but then there are actual gambling smart contracts, and also you can do lending in stable cryptocurrencies that are much harder to call “gambling”

MakerDao?

I read that paragraph as they have moved on from “scummy Etherium ... nonsense”.

We always need convenient monikers for concepts and while “dapp” isn’t the most elegant, it is no worse than “cloud”.

The fact that people are putting their creative energies into decentralised technology (which is very much swimming against the current and involves solving many very difficult problems) is to be applauded.

seriously, I do applaud the efforts of the p2p community. But the Blockchain/ETH/IOTA/whatever crowd isn't creating anything that works. The more serious people in academia who are working on it dismiss critics and they'll tell you "well the tech is still young, and its promises shouldn't be dismissed". That is great but then stop peddling it like it's the best thing since tabbed browsing.

As for this specific project ...

Before I'll applaud a project that references ETH and talks about "web3" (tHe fUtuRe oF tHE wEb) they should produce something that isn't a scam. There are literally thousands of them: https://cryptoscamdb.org/scams/ (filter for ETHEREUM).

ETH has shown during the infamous fork that you can't build anything worthwhile based on these systems and their past behavior clearly indicates they took money from people without knowing what they're doing. Fake it till you make it at its finest.

All these things are broken not because the tech is flawed but the assumptions that in case something goes wrong the system can self-correct without human intervention. In the smart-contract world "a bug" literally means either total failure of the project (and bankruptcy of the company backing it).

Another problem is that the community is so ignorant that they call anyone who criticizes them as shills the same way people in my camp do. They are the anti-vaxxers and flat-earthers of Tech! -> at least until they can proof (not on paper but with real life projects) that this isn't the case.

Wow. I'm constantly amazed at the tendency to instantly dismiss anything related to cryptocurrency as "scammy".

This is a tool to publish websites on IPFS. It will integrate optional web3 (Ethereum) support in the future. Ethereum is not a requirement to use this tool.

referencing a scammy project like ETH in a project that the author believes is not a scam doesn't exactly speak for whatever it is they're peddling. Every time I read jargon like Web3 and dapp I am a little sick in my mouth because I know there are people who don't pay so much attention and get easily sucked into the whole nonsense.

You think a distributed virtual machine that executes code is scammy? Maybe it can be used for scams by people who are scammers. So is email scammy too? Are telephones scammy? I believe they are all technology and can be used for whatever people want to do with them.

instead of your comment it would have been more convincing if you pointed me to the many success cases which I have missed where cryptocurrencies and blockchains have lead to anything other than a scam.

Because anything I come across in that domain, I can smell the stink from miles away!

Don't conflate dapps with scams. I enjoy building small experimental dapps that I just throw out on the blockchain and let people toy around with. No-one is making any money and no-one is in control. Call it art if you will but for me that's an appeal in itself, even if it serves no higher purpose.

Another aspect is that I really like the fact that I don't have any responsibilities once it's launched. No servers to take care of or feedback to consider. It's truly decentralized.

> Call it art if you will

that sounds awesome actually. But then they should label it as such and (like IOTA) go to places like Volkswagen and CISCO and peddle this stuff as "the future" and make fraudulent claims on twitter that these big companies have "already started" building their systems on that nonsense.

Exactly. Until there's a proven and functional use case for blockchains that will actually help businesses that's just straight-up snake oil. Right now it's an interesting concept but not much more - that's why I classify it as art. All my dapps could just as well have been centralized on a regular server with the same functionality but I put them on the blockchain for fun and experimentation.

Could you point to some examples?

They already hijacked the term "crypto". Perhaps "terminal" is next.