I mean, that's cool and all, except I've been hearing "it's too early, it's not for you, give it 10 more years" for like 10 years now. So I don't really believe you when you say it'll get there eventually. Have you considered... it just won't get there? Or that there are incentives in place to prevent it from getting there?

Here have been the phases so far:

Gen 1: Bitcoin - general ideas established, mostly a proof of concept

Gen 2: ETH - Building on bitcoin's ideas it establishes the idea of the VM + chain, which transforms bitcoin into essentially a new digital economy.

Gen 3: AVAX/SOL/DOT - ETH with scaling and fixes environmental concerns

AVAX, the chain I develop on, and the one that has the best technology to enable the capabilities required is less than a year old. Solona and Polka Dot are 2 years old.

The stuff i'm talking about is what I would call Gen 5. I think it's pretty unfair to say it's always been "10 years in the future".... a lot of progress has been made, it just might not be apparent if you're not active in the space.

> I think it's pretty unfair to say it's always been "10 years in the future".... a lot of progress has been made, it just might not be apparent if you're not active in the space.

My general metric is when people use something for a purpose other than working on that technology. For example, the web very quickly passed that point very quickly because you had people sharing scientific information, building personal sites, using it for businesses which weren't selling web technologies, etc. where the underlying technology was the vehicle but not the purpose.

There haven't been many examples of that in the blockchain space so far — a few places accepting it in addition to credit card transactions, etc. — but almost all of it has been focused on generating business for various blockchains rather than being better than or even competitive with existing options (e.g. how many NFTs were marketed and priced based on their artistic merits versus “you're going to make a fortune if you buy now!”?). Do you have an good examples of things like that which are actually used by non-cryptocurrency people[1] and have some advantage from using this stack unrelated to selling tokens?

1. The equivalent of, say, the people I helped get online in the mid-90s because they wanted to join hobby forums like photo.net, email relatives, get stock quotes, etc. but weren't really interested in the technology in its own right.

You're looking in the wrong places. Look up VitaDAO, Molecule, HairDAO - three projects making real scientific impact enabled by crypto.

How would you summarize their impact?

Two novel ways:

1) they're funding previously biotech companies (e.g. traditional venture not interested because insurance companies won't reimburse hair loss treatments)

2) incentivizing scientists (and other workers) from anywhere in the world to work part time towards these scientific goals

This is only possible due to the token incentive schemes and DAO governance structure. Crypto was never envisaged as a way to improve science, but it's being adopted anyway.

Neither of those seems novel - privately funded research has a long history - so I guess the argument is that they might have less overhead than other payment mechanisms? Given the skill requirements to assess whether someone is qualified to work on the problem or has made real progress, I’m also curious what value you get from a blockchain versus any other form of organization since the hard part is getting people from the same pool of human reviewers.

AVAX/SOL/DOT fix ETH/BC fixing environmental concerns; that's primarily referring to PoS and different variants, right?

It's worth noting that while it fixes the environmental aspect, it seems to reduce claims made regarding decentralization, wouldn't you agree? If so, one of the core tenants of crypto (arguably /the/ most significant) gets effectively traded off in favor of fixing environmental concerns. I'd imagine that would make non-BC/ETH crypto an unappealing for some as BC/ETH is currently for the environmentally concerned.

I've not heard a convincing argument regarding the ability of PoS, or any of its variations, to prevent centralization in any significant way. Do you have any references you'd recommend?

But like, who are you to say that it won't get there? If such a large group of very smart people want to continue to work on this tech that they all believe has massive potential, maybe you should consider the possibility that you are wrong?

It's not like Blockchain is the only tech people have been talking about for the last 10 years that hasn't been fully actualized yet. Doesn't mean it's not well on its way.

And a lot of very smart people worked on Itanium! Or on the Segway. TransMeta. Google Glass must have taken thousands of world-class engineers. 3D TVs! The world is full of plenty of Very Smart People who are all dying to work on cool tech, often blissfully unaware of the economic and social consequences of what they build.

Saying very smart people work on it doesn't do much to really convince me. Bitcoin's block size isn't a technical debate that requires Very Smart People to solve. It's a social one, about externalities, core beliefs, power structures, and motivations. And those are ones that Very Smart People tend not to make progress on, because they're unable to step outside of their lens of technicalities.

> It's not like Blockchain is the only tech people have been talking about for the last 10 years that hasn't been fully actualized yet.

How many of those technologies had no impact for that long but then went on to be significantly useful? The only examples which come to mind are things like mRNA vaccines which had far more development & approval hurdles, which is a pretty different situation from systems which are globally available but generally just haven't found a niche where they're a good fit and affordable.

It's more that web3 was created as a marketing term to escape the bad reputation cryptocurrencies had developed over the first decade or so. “web2 people” don't really exist — it's just the web, which all of the “web3” projects also rely on. When someone builds something useful with web technologies, the definition of “web” will expand to include it. If they end up with a stack which doesn't bridge to the web, it'll get a different name.

Can you provide any estimates on when the crypto world will start building things for regular folks that aren't just new ways to speculate on assets? Because, quite frankly, this is exactly what I've been hearing for the last decade.

Because right now the web3 ecosystem seems to cut directly against the ethos of "build stuff that solves a problem for your users". It seems like it's becoming increasingly insular for who its solving problems for - namely other people building things in the web3 space.

Like imagine its the 1980s and the industry decided it was stupid to build a home computer because we didn't have X Y or Z built yet so these machines are for computer enthusiasts, scientists, and researchers ONLY.

Each generation of tech seems to take 3-4 years, and I think we're 2 generations away when I map out a roadmap of needs (which I might be completely wrong about). So 6-8 years? My own personal opinion.

The early "killer" products and projects are there, but most people are looking in the wrong places (DeFi). Some examples below.

Consumer apps:

- STEPN

- Superlocal

The future of brands (NFTs):

- Doodles

- BAYC

Science funding:

- VitaDAO

- Molecule

- HairDAO

NFTs and particularly BAYC being a killer anything is hilarious to me. I wouldn't pay $5 for a thousand such ape drawings, and suspect most others wouldn't either.

if BAYC is a killer app then web3 is doomed.

Using NFTs to enforce digital scarcity and 'ownership' of content can be cool.

but the idea of a exclusive social club where you can only get into by buying a million dollar avatar is a little ridiculous. IF they actually had good content in the group that would make sense but it seems to be mostly an MMO

the pictures dont even have any taste and the whole thing feels overly commercial and reeks of group-think.

Do the opposite: take the best functioning crypto system you can imagine, and remove all the tech decentalisation and inherent transaction costs.

I think you'll find you've just invented a better version of that system.

> remove all the tech decentalisation and inherent transaction costs.

cost: check, definitely.

decentralisation: nope, that's the point.

If you have to go to bitcoin.com to get your drug money, you can just shut that site down.

The Pirate Bay still works even though it's blocked in lots of countries, because running a mirror on a new domain is incentivised by littering the site with scammy ads, and the trackers and magnet links are an organic, decentralised matter.

Cash

Yes, you'd then need some middlemen... but are the cost of those middlemen really higher than a skil-road rugpull? Or a crypto crash? Or all the pyramid-scheme lot coming in to pump your dark money system, and screwing you over?

I believe you may be missing the point:

"It's just not possible today to build a sophisticated purely digital, autonomous decentralized service/product today."

The things that customer's didn't ask for is a vaporous abstraction such as "a sophisticated purely digital, autonomous decentralized service/product"

Here's a more concrete example: coupons.

I, as a supplier, want to prevent coupon fraud - a ~300M year problem. Today they mitigate this with trust relationships between retailers and distributers, which consequentially means that coupons are less widely distributed and more marginal in what discounts they offer than they could be.

When coupons are redeemed, a cashier stuffs them in a bag, they get counted and redeemed and the supplier cuts a check. A shady retailer can simply say they have double the coupons they actually received, and they will get the same check. There's nothing unique about the coupon to prevent this.

Ignoring web3, how could you solve this? You could set up some simple database and rest api and have the coupons have some unique identity. You'd need to make this cryptographically secure so you couldn't simply forge identities, you'd need to be able to issue these easily and in bulk, have them expire at a certain time, onboard retailers to easily redeem these coupons and then facilitate payments to the retailer.

And, well, that's essentially what Hedera does[1], as a cryptographic DLT. Its value is that the cryptographic proof of whether something is unique and how it can be redeemed is done via NFT, and this protects against a number of attacks at the "consensus level". It offers you a secure way to do this and not run any computer, for minimal and predictable fees. Every transaction is fixed to USD and costs 0.0001 USD and completes in 5 seconds.

https://hedera.com/users/coupon-bureau

If you don't believe me that the customer is asking for this maybe you can listen to them yourself:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?app=desktop&v=--Bw8yYwJL4

"It's just not possible today to build a sophisticated purely digital, autonomous decentralized service/product today."

Granted, Hedera is digital, but from the description in the link you posted it's neither autonomous nor decentralized. "Target and General Mills" may have access to it, but I certainly can't post a "50% off my hand knitted sweater"-Coupon to it. I may also need some convincing that Hedera users are able to verify the cryptographic integrity of a coupon without running "any computer".

"Ignoring web3, how could you solve this?"

Roughly in the way you describe, with a database. You even go on to say "that's essentially what Hedera does", I fail to see the added benefit of slapping a blockchain/web3/NFT/whatever on top, but maybe I'm just ignorant.

The hedera network is autonomous and decentralized - TCB built on top of it. So to issue or redeem your coupon you'd need to participate in TCB, but as a result you'd be able to issue your coupons directly to consumers and then any retailer also in TCB would be able to redeem them.

> I fail to see the added benefit of slapping a blockchain/web3/NFT/whatever on top, but maybe I'm just ignorant.

Mainly being able to run this as a service and having assurance that the data you put onto it is correct, like a digital notary. And to provide assurances like no double spend and transaction ordering. A way to verify that something happened and not rely on an intermediary to decide that or to have custody of that data.

So for example Amazon could easily implement this, and do it at scale. Would you trust Amazon? To both keep custody of your data, ensure that it will always be available, that it would not be meddled with? Would an enterprise like Wal-Mart trust that?

That's essentially TCB's problem. Wal-Mart doesn't necessarily trust the TCB, either, even though it is industry non-profit. So TCB uses Hedera as its data layer - it does not own the data.

And how can Wal-Mart trust Hedera, ultimately? The governing council

https://hedera.com/council

> So for example Amazon could easily implement this, and do it at scale. Would you trust Amazon? To both keep custody of your data, ensure that it will always be available, that it would not be meddled with? Would an enterprise like Wal-Mart trust that?

Yes, far more so because Amazon will give you a legally binding contract with things like SLAs.

The problem with decentralized systems is that serious apps cost more to run but people generally don’t want to pay for things which don’t benefit them. You can ameliorate the performance and reliability problems of a blockchain by throwing capacity at it but there’s always the question of why you wouldn’t spend less to run your own private system to avoid the possibility of having problems caused by people you don’t even know about.

SLA is simply an intent to provide a level of service. If that can't be met, then there'd be an agreement on what the consequence of that was. Don't meet an availability SLA and maybe you get some credit back. You can't offer a best effort for non-repudiation of data. It either is or it isn't.

Maybe trust is the wrong word. Like - yes they might say they intend to provide this level of service, but the only way they can actually guarantee that level of non-repudiation of data is with cryptographic proofs and decentralized consensus and now you've basically got a cryptographic ledger.

PoW Blockchain isn't the only technology to accomplish this, either. There's a whole host of blockchain and post-blockchain technologies seeking to corner that market - a more efficient blockchain. Hedera for example uses the hashgraph algorithm.

If you built the coupon system you describe - one where any retailer can redeem the coupon at face value without a preexisting trust relationship with the coupon’s backer - you would not have ‘solved coupon fraud’, you would have created a cash alternative.

And a cash alternative has a bunch of problems of its own - most notably, money laundering and its utility in conducting fraud and getting payouts for extortion rackets like ransom ware.

These are issues that centralized coupons have. Trustless ones would have it even worse.

Are you sure the retail industry, or consumers, are crying out for a trustless coupon solution?

The technology doesn't have to solve all problems to have economic value. Arguably the "cash alternative" problem is a fundamental problem of coupons themselves. And as you point out, these are not new problems, and does an immutable public ledger makes such activity easier to audit and prosecute? I would argue 'yes' and that web3 has not made the problem worse but in fact better. The authorities do not need to request your books for starters. And as a retailer you do not need to maintain the books. Its already in a trusted ledger. This is a market efficiency. Inefficiency is not a way to secure things.

As far as doubt whether customers are asking for this - I mean, again you can listen above but yes a number of large retailers and vendors like Wal-mart and P&G are going live with this use-case this year.

And who are we to decide what is economically viable and what isn't? Let the market decide.

Maybe a key distinction here is that TCB itself is not trustless - it requires KYC, etc. But where data is stored and redeemed is on the trustless, decentralized Hedera network. It functions as an automated, secure ledger.

You could replace Hedera with a private blockchain or another ledger - likely not a public one due to unpredictable transaction fees or high time to consensus - the value is the same.

Customers don't ask for you to use a handsaw or a circular saw. They ask for a house at the highest quality for the lowest price. The companies that use the most productive technologies will be the ones that win. I personally suspect when all the pieces are together autonomous decentralized services will out compete corporations to deliver value to customers.

> how you would build a blockchain based business

What problems does a "blockchain based business" solve? That's what I don't understand.

Most businesses out there derive value by interacting with off-chain, real-world state.

If you wanted to use a blockchain in this case you'd need some trusted party to sync the blockchain state with the state of the real world, which then nullifies most/all of the advantages of using a blockchain over just letting this trusted party run an old school database.

I don't see how a blockchain will ever be ready. They don't scale by their nature, have huge security risks (regular people don't want to manage their keys), the unit economics of running on other peoples computers do not pencil out, people don't want immutability once you think about it holistically, and many other reasons.

> They don't scale by their nature

I think there's a few different things to think about here. Does EVERYTHING need to be on-chain? No, clearly not. but for the stuff that does it's been found that you can scale by having multiple chains. I mostly use AVAX, it's like ETH but uses a DAG for consensus, which means finality is WAY faster (seconds). It also has a concept called subnets, so scale is accomplished by having multiple blockchains which can interoperate with each other. Not all validators validate all subnets, but all subnets have multiple validators. Your need for level of security is going to depend on your application. Defi has a high need for security, gaming has a low need. The idea of 1 chain for everything is kind of obsolete.

That still doesn’t scale. It’s slightly better than ethereum

> regular people don't want to manage their keys

They don't have to, but they can if they want to.

If regular people manage their own keys, they will lose everything.

This is a really great take. Agree wholeheartedly.

What crypto business do you imagine making and what are the missing pieces?

This is just me, don't interpret what i'm saying as being some kind of community consensus. Many probably disagree with me.

I think nearly anything digital can be turned into a crypto business that can operate more effeciently than a corporation. Anything that touches the real world however will require a corporation with people. The solutions I've seen for interfacing with the real world just suck, and I suspect that is a fundumental problem. So in my opinion, the strength is digital. Fortunately for crypto, most things real world have the ability to be turned digital (think CAD -> 3D printer).

Why would a crypto business out compete a corporation? To me the answer comes down to how your business is structured. Corporations are structured around managing people. Crypto businesses (I think when some workflow pieces are added) can be structured around interfacing with AI. An entire world of AI can freely contribute value to a crypto business where as a corporation will have to prioritize, plan, and execute. We can kind of see that today, the biggest whales in crypto have bots doing the heavy lifting. People struggle to interface with crypto, but bots interface natively. This probably sounds hand wavy. At some point when I find time I'll try to write into more detail on how I personally believe this can work.

I'm certain Crypto + AI = an accerlerated future. I'm motivated to work in this space, because if done wrong, this is a disaster for society. If done fairly, we can build something amazing.

> So a lot of the good stuff that was/is being built this cycle, the stuff that's going to survive the bear market is critical infrastructure meant to support the future new startups in the blockchain space... the customer of crypto today, is crypto. Combined these capabilities will enable a very powerful platform which will eventually serve businesses and individuals. Today, it's not ready for your needs.

This is why Stripe, Moneygram, Checkout.com, etc are choosing the blockchain technologies that are useful to them, which tells us that some of them are going to survive past this bear market and make it past regulations. Not all of these crypto projects will survive either but a certain few will.

Again, like the free-software activists who have been disappointed with their mission in removing all non-free software which the web2 tech bros have hijacked the 'open-source' term as cover to suggest their so-called 'transparency' in closed-source surveillance capitalist companies like Google, Microsoft, Facebook, etc, we are now seeing them going to be very disappointed with the hope of absolute obliteration and complete removal of everything web3 and blockchain related.

I'm afraid that this 'destroying' or 'removal' of it all is not going to happen, just like it isn't going to take over the current system. Like closed-source software, crypto is here to stay and both web2 and web3 people are going to be very disappointed.