If anything, it's the FOMO-ing developers of these techs that are looking for problems.
You must be kidding when you say that AI produced as much snake oil as cryptos. Sure, there were/are startups using AI as a selling point when there is not much behind, but in most cases AI actually solves real world problems and adds value. Cryptos are stricly a negative-sum game and ponzi schemes.
Just because it's corporate snake-oil doesn't mean it isn't snake oil.
Tell me how someone living in a country with heavy capital controls can participate in the global economy on equal footing with someone from a more developed country without blockchain, and you might be a candidate for a Nobel Prize.
Or tell me simply how someone can make a living with work that threatens the status quo without worrying about being ostracized.
If you want to have any kind of hedge against the continuous, systemic institutional failures, you can not simply try to build another system that puts another institution at the top.
I doubt you will, but you asked, so: byzantine Paxos.
The point of the person you are responding to is that solving decentralized consensus is only an academic exercise. If your country wants to prevent your from participating in an economy, it can; the only recourse is political.
Okay, I should've added "permissionless" to the list of desired properties. If you can a priori choose who gets to participate you´d have a point.
> If your country wants to prevent your from participating in an economy, it can
I think that the eternally losing "War on Drugs" should be a lesson that shows this is simply not true. Also, consider how Black Markets are a thing in authoritarian places, not free ones.
So, no, as much as a country can make it difficult for others, they can not outright stop anyone without significant cost to themselves.
And "zero trust" is a myth. We can see that from the $7.7 BILLION in fraud that has been committed in crypto markets in just the last year. https://www.zdnet.com/article/scammers-grabbed-7-7-billion-w...
"Zero trust" is meant to refer to the data layer: because the current state of a blockchain system can be re-generated deterministically from the historical data—which is immutable and fully auditable—you don't have to trust anyone's version of the current system state, even if you are not yourself currently keeping a copy of it.
These technologies do not solve all of the moral and ethical problems that humanity faces, but I don't think anyone is claiming that they do. Blockchains don't stop people from deceiving each other, and they don't make people smarter so that they entirely avoid introducing bugs into their software, and they don't stop people from trying to steal from one another.
But they do make it possible to decentralize high-value data records that would otherwise need to live in high-security environments controlled by governments or well-capitalized businesses that would also need to be trusted 100% not to tamper with those records.
Every honestly distributed blockchain is scam or soon to be scam, because to incentivize distribution a rewards are required (tokens), and that completely upends social expectations of the app, regardless of its stated purpose. Node keepers and token owners want to pump the token price by any means necessary. App users (if any) are facing an adversary and hostile environment because they are the afterthought, second class, and hodlers are a priority.
Centralized blockchain on the other hand is simply ridiculous, except for the ultra narrow market of version control systems. People are delusional if they think a centralized blockchain will ever be more useful for anything else than a normal DB.
So don't use blockchain to create a digital currency, or anything decentralized because it still needs a central authority to determine the truth. What is the actual use case then?! What app uses it successfully and solves problems that were hard to solve before?
I'm sincere, BTW. You sound like you have some examples in mind.
Anyway, this topic has been discussed to death already, you can also search in HN for detailed articles on the topic.
There you go.
> But if I want to build my app with a blockchain integration, or using a blockchain to store a portion of my data, what’s your problem with that?
Many people incorrectly associate 'blockchain' == 'Bitcoin' with all the issues it has. So anything blockchain is bad / scam / pyramid ponzi / planet destroyer, proof-of-waste (PoW), piece-of-sh*t (PoS) etc.
If web3 with blockchain / NFT / metaverse / etc is not the future, ignore it. Simple. I should not see anyone who hates blockchains, NFTs or metaverse in general to continue to comment on every. single. thread. tweet. or post about it. as it is excruciatingly difficult for some to do this.
So I will expect a ton of responses when another crypto scam happens, but not when an emerging regulated application of a blockchain project is used today.
The problem is that many people building blockchain projects mean "Blockchain" == "Ethereum", which is basically the same thing.
I can understand some critics’ opposition to cryptocurrencies on public policy grounds (although I think most critics are too broad in their critique), or their opposition to NFTs based on the fact that many NFTs are bullshit don’t represent ownership of anything at all (although I think that will not always be the case).
What I don’t understand—and where these critics loose credibility with me—is their rejection of the entire class of blockchain technologies.
If you don’t want to use a blockchain to build your app, fine! Don’t do it!
But if I want to build my app with a blockchain integration, or using a blockchain to store a portion of my data, what’s your problem with that?
To me, it all sounds very similar to, “don’t build your app using Microsoft tech, only use open source” or “don’t use NoSQL for storage, use an RDBMS instead.” It’s like a new version of those ridiculous religious wars people would have over technology preferences, only now higher-stakes and even more passionate.