> it's hard to see what's actually the practical benefit of that
Its utility is much easier to see if you're stuck in a system rife with corruption and have a general lack of trust in central institutions. A key aspect of corruption is that central authorities are not accountable to anyone.
With blockchains, you can design systems where game theory via what's encoded into system design, can limit what concentrations of power can do. The centralized powers in bitcoin for example, can't rationally act in way that destroys the value of the system they're participating in. This is totally not true for many developing economies; just that property is already an encouraging one.
Working on scaling these systems, making them less resource intensive and proving stronger more formal bounds for open peer to peer friendly non-discriminatory systems that are harder to corrupt and more robust to bad actors is a not a solution in search of a problem.
This sounds good. But I think technology cannot solve political issues or corruption of central authorities.
The reason in my mind is simple: a corrupt central system will never choose such technology.
In our human history we kept inventing technology but it (the technology) never fixed corruption. Of course maybe web3 is truly something special but I doubt this. Why: because I dont see how this techology changes fundamental human nature.
Here is an example: people were saying that internet (web1 or web2 not sure how to name this) will offer free access to knowledge thus making everybody smarter. But we see this not happening. It is true that more people are smarter or better but many many more are influenced by internet in bad (corrupted) ways.
Can you elaborate more? It's unclear to me how a data storage technology has any bearing on trust and power relationships, especially in interactions that are largely in meatspace.
Its utility is much easier to see if you're stuck in a system rife with corruption and have a general lack of trust in central institutions. A key aspect of corruption is that central authorities are not accountable to anyone.
With blockchains, you can design systems where game theory via what's encoded into system design, can limit what concentrations of power can do. The centralized powers in bitcoin for example, can't rationally act in way that destroys the value of the system they're participating in. This is totally not true for many developing economies; just that property is already an encouraging one.
Working on scaling these systems, making them less resource intensive and proving stronger more formal bounds for open peer to peer friendly non-discriminatory systems that are harder to corrupt and more robust to bad actors is a not a solution in search of a problem.