Now, you may not care for law evasion, and that’s fine. But it’s asinine to pretend that crypto tech is not better for such purposes than “an SQLite database running on a raspberry pi.”
I for example don't think it's a technical feature.
> Compare and contrast with Tornado Cash, which still works fine despite being OFAC sanctioned.
This is why it might just be the thing that ends unrestricted access to Internet. P2P sharing music or torrenting movies caused a lot of noise but in the end violating copyright is not a big concern compared to laundering proceeds from criminal activities.
What cryptocurrency is? The answer is none, because there are several weak points to any cryptocurrency and if state agencies choose to take them seriously they can easily shut them down.
No, we don't. The thing is, every time a "good application of crypto" comes up the next question is "show these to us". And invariably those "good applications" have no idea what they are doing, require centralized trusted entities to function, and can be run from a Raspberry Pi.
But for the vast majority of businesses which interact with the real world, it doesn't matter whether the actual logic is on a bulletproof, uncensorable VM if the government can just go after the few input/output points where the system interacts with the real world.
Therefore, it's no better than just running SQLite and much worse because crypto makes significant tradeoffs (to be resistant to adversary interference) that aren't actually useful here.
They don't go down if you turn off your Raspberry Pi.
I also can be 99.9999% sure that they run correctly and Ethereum itself is pretty unhackable, as proven by the multi-billion bug-bounties.
The smart contracts running on Ethereum are open source, unlike your PHP script, can be audited, and if marked immutable, i'm sure no malicious person/business can hack or change it, and if they do it has an auditable backlog.
And equally sure that any bug in there (and there will be bugs in there) is unfixable and any funds stolen through it unretrievable.
"smart contracts" are neither.
This is tech. Not its applications.
> The smart contracts running on Ethereum are open source, unlike your PHP script, can be audited, and if marked immutable,
Ah, to once again have a child's wonder and belief in magic. Just add th incantation "blockchain ethereum smart contracts", and all is right with the world.
Meanwhile reality [1] just in the past ten days:
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Insufficient validation on an OHM smart contract at Bond Protocol allowed an attacker to drain 30,437 OHM (~$300,000) from the Olympus DAO defi protocol.
Olympus DAO wrote in an announcement that "This bug was not found by 3 auditors, nor by our internal code review, nor reported via our Immunefi bug bounty."
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On October 14, Ethereum reached a milestone that alarms many who have pushed for blockchains as "censorship-proof" technology. More than 51% of blocks produced in the preceding 24 hours were processed by relays that filtered out transactions involving Tornado Cash
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The defi project Earning.Farm lost 748 ETH (~$971,000) to a hacker using a flash loan attack. The project contract was missing a check that a flash loan was initiated by the protocol, so the attacker was able to instruct the project to withdraw large amounts of funds
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Rabby Swap, a feature of the Rabby crypto wallet, was exploited a month after it was first rolled out. An attacker discovered an apparent vulnerability in the Rabby Swap smart contract that enabled them to arbitrarily transfer other users' funds.
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Words that precede every DeFi hack with a ridiculous nominal dollar value.
In which case it doesn't matter if it's on a Blockchain or a raspberry pi because the consensus layer being trusted is secondary
With blockchains we have "a subset of the current compute power on the planet could start subverting it immediately".
Name some. Some that can't be better done with an sqlite database running on a Raspberry Pi.