Typewriters had immediate value: buy one and you can produce easier to read documents faster — a very fast writer might do as much as 30 words per minute, which is like a third of a proficient typist’s throughput. Businesses bought them rapidly because it meant the same number of clerks could do more work and you reduced errors due to bad handwriting.

Put another way, the first commercial typewriter was sold in 1874 and was an immediate success. By the 1880s, typist was a booming field — especially for women seeking employment outside of the home.

Blockchains have been commercially active for 13 years at this point. If Bitcoin shut off tomorrow, the only reason anyone who isn’t involved in shilling it would know is that all of the speculators would be screaming for government bailouts.

> Typewriters had immediate value

The GP pulled one of the cryptobro rhetorical scams: X existing technology took Y years to catch on!

Besides the statements rarely actually being true they're nonsensical. A typewriter (or whatever technology they point out) has obvious utility. No honest assessment of whatever they can bring up will say that X technology is useless. Maybe at the time typewriters we're released fountain pen manufacturers or penmanship clubs said they were useless. But they have a vested interest in the status quo.

I don't think most anyone pointing out flaws in cryptocurrencies have a vested interest in the status quo. I certainly don't. I don't and doubt you have some sort of short against Bitcoin or own a bank full of fiat currency.

The cryptobros can't seem to fathom that they got sold on a bunch of useless shit. When they're not at the top of the Ponzi scheme they can't seem to conceptualize that they've been had. It's kind of sad to see. At the same time it's infuriating because their scam is literally wasting a small country worth of electricity to mint Geoffrey dollars.

> The cryptobros can't seem to fathom that they got sold on a bunch of useless shit.

I think it’s more that they can’t afford to acknowledge it: the only way cryptocurrency has meaning is if they can line up a buyer, and as soon as you allow that to be questioned those big dreams about becoming as rich as the people selling them on “web3” start to look pretty unlikely. A lot of these people have built their vision of the future on very high returns and the only way that happens is if they donate their time pro bono to the major investors backing these companies.

Gotta pay the upline.

So your reasoning does not deal with anything we're discussing, rather you go on describing people as cryptobros, define their characteristics and then make a conclusion, based on what you think. So you didn't bring anything to the conversation other than your wrongly held opinions. I could go on my own exploration and conclude that you, speaking in such a way, don't know what you are talking about.

You could, but you'd be wrong.

The difference being that for typewriters there were also answers to those questions.

That hasn't answered my question though. Name one advantage of using a blockchain for insurance policy management over the systems that we have now.

Not having to speak to anyone to do it. I don't know if blockchain is going to go anywhere but I think there's inherent advantages in not talking to anyone (and being able to do it programatically) to do banking-like things. What you get in exchange is lack of security, no recourse when things go wrong, and possibly being in the same space as criminals. But there's a palpable advantage to not having to interact with any humans in order to do things that historically require a lot of meat space interactions that now can be automated by anyone in their home.

It's like having access to a completely deregulated bank ran by the mafia that has an API anyone can use. I think there's use cases for that, though maybe not the ones the community usually mentions.

But like.....what kind of things can you do without interacting with people when using a blockchain? Name anything. My insurance policy I bought online and I can manage entirely online, change the address, the car, the add-ons, add and remove drivers as well as cars......what exactly is blockchain allowing me to do here that I can't do already?

Same with the bank. I don't think I ever had to speak to my bank in the 8 years I've been with them, or even been to their branch for that matter. You do everything online or in the app.

IMO it is because so many people have a kind of sexual fetish of technophilia. They literally get off on new technology. It doesn't matter if it doesn't solve anything. It just needs to feel new and as if progress is being made. As long as it feels new and like progress the technophile will be happy to reinvent the wheel.

Even the word technophile has positive connotations as opposed to something deviant in our society. We don't even have a word for a deviant technophile , deviant over obsession with nonsense and "the next big thing".

With this attitude, nothing. I've compared it to an unregulated banking API. So for example you can launder money, do transfers that don't go through KYC, among other things.

By now you can also do things that benefit from the network effect of crypto enthusiasts, for example, you can sell JPEGs from a no-name artist for significant amounts of money, which would historically be difficult for outsider-art, regardless of the fact that you're not even selling the actual rights to the images. It also proved to be an interesting way to speculate on internet memes.

There's millions of people using this ecosystem, even if it ends up being overall net negative for the world and a temporary technological distraction, I think one should be able to neutrally assess what it's being used for. You may not like it but it's like saying a nuclear bomb has no use. You may not like what it's being used for, and it may be immoral or illegal, but to say there's no uses when clearly millions are engaging with it and doing "stuff", seems short-sighted for the purposes of discussion.

The last paragraph is what I'm trying to advance in discussions here. You put it much better though.

> Not having to speak to anyone to do it.

So it's only good for circumventing crippling social phobia? How many people suffer from those? And, hey, I've been using non-Blockchain-based online banking since around the turn of the century; can't recall when I last spoke to a bank teller, but it must have been well over a decade ago[1]. So even that use case is adequately solved without Blockchain.

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[1]: Except for buying some foreign cash before going on vacation, that may have been in 2012. Do the clerks at Forex count as bank tellers?

no they didn't ask the same question, because the electronic keyboard had solved some problems better than a typewriter.

I think there are problems that are suited to be solved on the blockchain - like land titles, domain names, etc. But the existing solution to those problems are adequate, and the sudden change is too costly.

People ask the same questions about any new technology, and most of the time they are right, it's not going to revolutionise the world.