mastermind
So true.
With LLMs, I can think of a few realistic and valuable applications even if they don’t successfully deliver on the hype and don’t actually shake the world upside down. With blockchain, I just could never see anything in it. Anyone trying to sell me on its promises would use the exact words people use to sell a scam.
I think blockchain, as a concept, had some promise, but those damn buzzword vultures killed anything it had going for it.
Crypto’s main draw was being decentralized and unregulated. Once that was taken away, it just became another speculative investment. NFTs as a token of ownership for things that actually have inherent value like a car, or a house, makes sense on paper, but would require a lot of standardization before it became feasible digital asset management (i.e. reduce blockchain theft scams). Ownership if a jpeg stollen from deviantart doesn’t even make sense on paper and I’m convinced those prices were mainly driven by money laundering.
Cryptocurrency is basically like digital cash.
Cash doesn’t leave you holding worthless numbers when the founders cut and run.
Well, it does in some economies, but not the ones that cryptocurrency advocates actually choose to live in. If you live in Menlo Park or Toronto or Phoenix or Dublin, you live in conditions that would not be possible without a stable “real money” economy.
Imagine, if you will, a blockchain interface, where the container the user interacts with is a bank-like system, and the blockchain account password is tied into the “bank” account itself. The user would then be able to interact with it in a mostly familiar and secure way, and though it wouldn’t eliminate scams, it would certainly reduce them.
Now obviously there’s a lot of “if, and’s or but’s” with what I just said as a “top-of-my-head” concept, but if you’ve ever worked in systems engineering, you’d understand that you start with a high-level concept that’s meant to play to a technology’s andantages, and keep working through the issues in the design process, either by working in existant technology that can mitigate issues, or designing to systemicallt avoid those issues.
My point is, blockchain’s strict security could be considered a massive advantage, but it never got the benefit of tech firms to look at it objectively and figure out a way to work with that in a rational manner, because of how quickly it became a super-hypey technology. And I 100% blame Silicon Valley tech bros for that.