
Where is the money for mobile app developers in blockchain? - hammadtariq
https://hackernoon.com/where-is-the-money-for-mobile-app-developers-in-blockchain-75960e106214
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paulsutter
The only significant business in cryptocurrency is trading cryptocurrency[1],
which is huge and very profitable. Non-cryptocurrency uses for blockchains
haven’t taken off (mostly ideaware around immutability).

[1]
[https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/volume/24-hour/](https://coinmarketcap.com/exchanges/volume/24-hour/)

~~~
wycs
Exactly, there may be non-pyramid scheme money in crypto but so far there is
no evidence for it. Look at the daily average users for Dapps
here:[https://www.stateofthedapps.com/rankings](https://www.stateofthedapps.com/rankings)

They are absurdly low. Like less than 100 users a day for anything that isn’t
a exchange.

Many of these dapps have market caps in the hundreds of millions with a few
dozen users per day.

~~~
paulsutter
The failure rate for cryptocurrency experiments will be high, but I’m glad to
see people trying. We’ll collectively learn from the efforts. Whatever the
number of frauds doesn’t detract from the set of smart guys who are likely
inventing something significant.

EDIT: I should have said "may be inventing". It's my opinion of a >50% chance
that Vitalik's work will lead to something significant, for example. Some
people will disagree and that's ok too.

~~~
pphysch
Why do you feel that it is "likely"?

~~~
TangoTrotFox
Not the person asked, but think about what cryptos fundamentally are -
decentralized trust among anybody. If it doesn't strike you as how tremendous
a tool that is, consider that many things, before the clever applications are
developed, sound rather less than inspiring. The internet, at its most
fundamental level, is nothing but the ability to send a signal representing a
1 or a 0 to another individual connected to 'the' network. That such a thing
would end up completely reshaping not only the world but every aspect of our
everyday lives is something that would have seemed rather hyperbolic at one
time.

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orasis
This author has no spine. If you want to be an entrepreneur, stop chasing fads
and start creating real value for people.

~~~
econochoice
Plenty of entrepreneurs have made a lot of money chasing fads. Web 2.0, NoSQL,
microservices, etc.

~~~
UncleEntity
How many of them made a lot of money chasing a literal fad -> foodie shots?

My great idea is to make a blockchain version of HN and instead of karma you
get HNCoin, just need a 100 million dollars and a top-100 userbase...

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Itaxpica
This article is basically a laundry list of why any legitimate money and most
legitimate developers are and should be extremely wary of blockchain. Lots of
buzzwords, big promises, and smoke, no real problems solved or paths to actual
profit other than “I dunno, sell some tokens I guess”.

------
gm-conspiracy
Any good resources for proof-of-work pseudo-code?

I am having trouble wrapping my head around the implementation, not theory, of
blockchain (ledger entry based on previously hashed ledger entry).

Like, how is the beginning of the ledger created/determined? Is that just a
nonce/IV?

How is each entry calculated and/or verified based on the previous entry?

~~~
foepys
You create a so called Genesis block on which everything is based. Maybe
include a timestamp (in case of Bitcoin a newspaper headline) to prove that
you didn't pre-mine and you are done. The Genesis block is then distributed
with each implementation for bootstrapping the verification process.

You calculate the hash of each block (which includes the hash of the previous
block) and check if it matches the hash in the next block. Each block also
includes the difficulty of the network at the time to prevent mining more than
x block per hour. The difficulty describes the "format" of the hash of each
block, e.g. the hash in hex format needs to have 50 times 0 at the beginning.

~~~
gm-conspiracy
Thank you for the response.

So, fundamentally, is everything just how many zeros prepend the "unique" hex
string (for proof-of-work)?

~~~
arcticbull
Yep, that's it as far as I know. Rather, the difficulty requirement sets forth
how many leading zeroes the hash of the data plus the variable parameter must
have.

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dane-pgp
One of the under-explored uses of the blockchain is as a decentralised
permissionless append-only log for tracking custody and authenticity of
physical products. This is also an area where a mobile app is well suited,
since users should be able to add to the log and check values on it wherever
they are, and ideally with a quick snap of a QR code or tap of an NFC tag.

Imagine that a mass-produced tech item from China came with a QR code
certificate authenticity, which the end user could scan to check that the item
had been made by a specific factory and a specific company. (The company could
also add extra metadata to a blockchain to detail how the goods travelled and
which are the approved importers).

The QR code should presumably have extra information in it which ties it to a
serial number baked into the silicon of the purchased item, but there are
other ways (based on double-spend prevention) that you could confirm a given
QR code hadn't merely been duplicated.

~~~
Dayshine
That's a really cool idea, but what on earth does it have to do with
blockchain? Wouldn't it work better with a trusted 3rd party centralised
system?

Issues I see: \- Does every phone now need to store the entire log? Otherwise,
who do you trust to give you the current state? \- What prevents me faking a
log? Why would people be doing constant work on the chain to prevent it?

~~~
jon_richards
The trusted 3rd party could be maintaining a blockchain. Blockchains don't
have to be decentralized, they're just a type of db that can be decentralized.

~~~
gm-conspiracy
You can do proof-of-work without a blockchain and have a trusted 3rd-party
entity, like hashcash...

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hashcash)

~~~
PKop
That produces a currency though, which would be the reward for the work.

What is the reward for doing such proof of work in the context of custody
chains?

~~~
gm-conspiracy
I am assuming the value of the custody chain as a whole and its constituents.

If intellectual property has value, then a hash of a particular work product
could be used in a chain-of-custody for ownership of IP (transfers, licensing,
etc).

But, yes, if it is just for virtual kittens and their accessories, I am at a
loss.

Otherwise, why are you wasting compute, right?

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chatmasta
As an entrepreneur, my problem with blockchain is that it consumes the image
and focus of your company. With blockchain, it seems like it’s all or nothing.
You’re either a “blockchain startup” or a “tech startup.” You can’t be a tech
startup that just happens to use blockchain in a part of your product. It
becomes the focus of your pitch and any hype it generates.

The irony is that for a “blockchain startup” to succeed, it must be solving a
problem that exists independently of blockchain, for which “blockchain” is
simply an implementation detail. There is most likely a way to solve the same
problem your blockchain startup is solving _without_ blockchain. If there is
not, I would suggest you might be solving a non-problem.

Adopting “blockchain” in any public way forces you to focus on a deceptively
non-critical aspect of your business. The more you integrate your product with
blockchain, the more your company depends on the success of crypocurrency in
general.

For example, consider you’re building a marketplace for Wordpress themes
backed by cryptocurrency. You end up creating a convoluted scheme to fit your
desired solution to the problem, when a simple network of payments on existing
infrastructure would suffice (and indeed has sufficed for years before
blockchain). In focusing on blockchain as a payment or distribution mechanism,
you are causing your product to depend on the success of the blockchain
ecosystem as a whole. You need people to use cryptocurrency in general, so
they can use it on your marketplace without friction. Put another way, unless
your product is truly category-defining, nobody is going to learn how to pay
with ethereum just to use it. The success of your product depends on the wider
adoption of cryptocurrency in general.

So as a blockchain startup you are betting on two things. One, that your
company can succeed in solving the problem it sets out to solve (a risky bet
in itself). And two, that the larger blockchain ecosystem will evolve as a
wider market of people adopt it and know how to use it with your product. Your
success is tied to two independent variables instead of just one. That seems
like an unnecessary risk IMO.

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russdpale
I don't see many use cases for phones outside of wallets. Even that is a bad
idea because phones of all varieties are so insecure. Mainly because people
don't update their phones for a myriad of reasons.

HN hates blockchain, so I doubt you will get a very good answer here. I am
blockchain admirer but I just don't see a lot of use cases on such an insecure
device outside of perhaps social media where you control your own data.
Reading the blockchain, sure.. writing to the chain? Not ideal.

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amelius
Where is the money for mobile app developers, period?

I've yet to see the first person in my personal network reaching a state of
being able to make a living from mobile apps (and obviously, I'm excluding the
survivor-bias stories from the media here).

~~~
davidmurdoch
I know the guy who made the unofficial Tesla app. He's doing _very_ well now.

Personally, I had an app that was on its way to allowing me to transition to
focusing on mobile app development full time. But it turns out you need a
license to perform money transference, which was what my app was... and
luckily Google shut me down before I got into high volume and any legal
trouble.

To your point: my second app was a super expensive (for me) colossal failure.

I know another guy who nets about $200k USD making puzzle apps, though that
also includes web apps started in the mid 2000s.

~~~
Fnoord
You "knowing a guy" means nothing. The point is that the signal to noise ratio
is extremely low. Not in useful apps, mind you, but _profitable_ apps. Why?
Competition.

