I find posts like this honestly infuriating because its like you don't know the first thing about an entire, specialized field, yet because its something taking place in tech you feel like you're qualified to write about it. Ask the same question about chemistry, biology, electrical engineering, or any STEM subject, and here's the actual answer: it's beyond the scope of a comment on hacker news to spoon feed you an entire fucking field in a way that will make sense to you.
You will have to read papers, and think about what works and doesn't, over years to understand what is going on. And to be ahead of the curve -- you'll also have to do your own experiments that 9/10 won't yield any interesting results. In the blockchain and 'crypto' industry we also have the problem that entry is easy while skilled execution is not. Consequently: many fuck-ups have happened. It's easy to point to them and say that 'this is the industry' but its really not. Those are a few bad eggs.
I genuinely cannot tell if this comment is veiled sarcasm or not. That or a question about concrete, practical examples of this tech and what unique advantages smart contacts bring to the table has hit a real nerve and set you off. If the latter is the case, that is of course a telling answer in itself.
It's not this specific question. It's the fact that any time anything about blockchain tech is posted on hacker news the first comment will be 'b-but where are the use-cases' with the second being something like 'lol scam.' It would be the equivalent of replying to every HN post with 'but why would anyone want to own a personal computer?' That's how irrelevant and uninformed these posts are.
Asking about practical applications of a relatively mature technology is an entirely, 100% legitimate question to ask. It is frequently asked about many other techs and advances, although it's also frequently omitted since the answer is obvious and readily available/forthcoming. Not so with pretty much anything blockchain. So yeah, if a technology is a solution in search of a problem for ten years, that's gonna come up a lot, and it's entirely fair. What else could be more relevant than that question, given all the hype?
>but why would anyone want to own a personal computer?
Both you and I can effortlessly come up with a dozen or two concrete answers (reality, not hypotheticals) to this question with no preparation whatsoever. Can you come up with just one single example for smart contracts? Reality, not hypotheticals. Heck, I'd settle for hypotheticals that are at least well on their way to reality.
- p2p asset exchange without centralised deposits (otherwise vulnerable to theft)
- micro-payments and offchain payments (they help to scale the tech)
- flash loans (instant access to unlimited capital)
- escrow (setting up N-of-M access to funds -- this would require a lawyer in real life and still be unreliable)
- streamable pay rolls (when you sign an employment contract
-- you get paid after the first week(s/s/s/s) -- you can stream money to employees over time with smart contracts -- this is genuinely novel)
- automated vesting payouts (again -- most employees have to trust their boss to send whatever vested shares theyre owed. you can setup a smart contract to do this to minimise trust and ensure you will be paid.)
- provably backed derivative contracts of many different types (conventional financial contracts require the assumption that the exchange can actually back up contract values -- with blockchain smart contracts you can setup 100 - N% fully collateralised positions -- 100% transparent. Recall what happened with game stop recently. Robin hood couldn't do shit if it were a DEX.)
there is one final killer use case for the tech and by itself its enough to justify it: decentralised markets. most of you remember silk road as a drug market. But believe it or not silk road was about more than just drugs. it was about having the freedom to trade as you saw fit. taking the good and bad as it came. the website sold books, hosting, and many legitimate products and services. of course -- no one ever gives ulbricht credit for that. silk road was the reason bitcoin had any value in the beginning. today there are many more use-cases though.
These are a bunch of either superficially or actually plausible ideas. How can I tell whether it's legit or bullshit without seeing how it fares in the real world? Perhaps I wasn't clear - I was looking for company names, product names, something I can get a feel for in terms of concrete metrics like $$$ invested, sales, profits, how it's faring in the real world, etc.
Genuine question from someone on the outside watching all of this: then who are these things for? Apparently not me, nor GP, nor my mum and dad. Are we waiting until the Smart People sort out all of these complex details to make this stuff accessible for regular people?
I'd say something like this: the average person isn't doing anything that complex with money. They can use cash for instant, real-time payments (with good counterfeit prevention), and can generally rely on their banks. But this is less than ideal because their assets can easily be seized, inflated, frozen, and their banks could fail. The blockchain could offer superior piece of mind or something of an insurance policy. Though the problem with that is most of the world runs on regular money so there would still need to be ways to buy/sell those assets.
To talk about the more specialized use-cases: there are some truly novel things that can only be done with the blockchain. To give you a direct example -- 'provably fair' gambling enables someone to place bets and know for certain that the result will be fair. This is accomplished by having outcomes enforced for a network of computers instead of trusting some shady website to stay fair. It's basically fully transparent. I know there will be people saying that this grasping at straws but the list of use-cases is quite long. I don't have time to research and list all the interesting ones here. But if anyone is interested in the subject I promise you that learning more about it won't be a disappointment.
It's just not easy to explain in short-form posts.
Nah, supporters of most of the tech (chemistry, biology, EE, whatever) can easy explain applications to layman, as well as explain why one would use it over alternatives.
There are some exceptions of course -- one example is "memristors", an very specialized EE concept that claims to revolutionize computing for least 20 years and yet never does. And if you look at its HN discussions, you'll see mostly skepticism and negativity, kinda like for blockchains.
counterpoint: engineers building complicated things /and then looking for a problem they would solve/ is bad.
if you are unable to easily explain it to a human who isn't your profession, it's snake oil.
what's a tooth filling? it's a bio-safe, quick setting, similar plasticity to your teeth enamel.
what's shipping logistics software? it's not wasting an idle or half empty truck.
what's S3? durable object storage.
what's the TLS certificate transparency chain? an append only, low power proof of what the CA's issued. No blockchains or smart contracts involved because it's less expensive and less absurd.
what's sigstore? an append only, low power signing proof of binaries, docker images, git commits, etc. No blockchains or smart contracts involved because it's less expensive and less absurd.
Too many blockchains and smart contracts and such seek to be "the engine" that everything runs on. They want web 3.0 because they want a do-over to be kingmakers.
what's HTTP/HTML? a simple way to exchange data between webservers & web browsers, the universal engine.
All of your examples are trivial and deal with every day concepts. Blockchain technology intersects cryptography, computer science, government, politics, economics, finance, information security, probably even sociology and philosophy. It's multi-disciplinary.
The idea that something needs to be simple to be legitimate is not a good one. Some things simply are complex and to say otherwise is to over-simplify them. Or reductionist. Much of the ground work requires questioning assumptions that people are already familiar with and accepted as true. Like the trust assumption in banking.
I can tell you first hand that when I pitched my blockchain startup back in 2013 the very first stumbling block I had was even getting people to understand Bitcoin. So go ahead and tell me that a large, in-depth field must mean its invalid. I think that's a silly idea.
Can you give examples of things which are "simply are complex and to say otherwise is to over-simplify them" and that are not either blockchain or snake oil?
Note that internal operation does not really matter, only applications do; I might have no idea how CRISP/CAS works, but I can totally understand some of its applications and why people call it revolutionary.
There are specialized journals for blockchain tech now.
Maybe 'diverse' would be a better word than 'complex' for blockchain tech because projects aren't all financial. The OP made the claim that he couldn't think of use-cases for smart contracts. The problem isn't that there are no use-cases but that there are too many. What use-cases are there for a language for structuring trust when it can touch so many areas?
Every time we have these threads ignoramuses wander in and expect those in the industry to justify their whole field and area of expertise. Even though from their questions the only thing they know about the industry comes from news headlines and memes. Yet this is what passes for discussion around here. They expect to be spoon fed an entire area of knowledge they know nothing about. And when failing to instantly grasp the years of knowledge people have in this area they declare that it doesn't exist.
Yet knowing a lot about crypto and blockchain, thinking about what works and doesn't, and over years reading papers and understanding the technology...
I can not think of a single usable problem that blockchain solves.
You will have to read papers, and think about what works and doesn't, over years to understand what is going on. And to be ahead of the curve -- you'll also have to do your own experiments that 9/10 won't yield any interesting results. In the blockchain and 'crypto' industry we also have the problem that entry is easy while skilled execution is not. Consequently: many fuck-ups have happened. It's easy to point to them and say that 'this is the industry' but its really not. Those are a few bad eggs.