People dismiss blockchain mainly because it's a solution looking for a problem, something that's not true for the other examples in your last paragraph. The fact that the people who are trying to sell it almost always seem to peddle some old scams in a trenchcoat doesn't help.
It isn't a "solution looking for a problem" anymore than any technology repeatedly shoehorned into unnecessary situations. NoSQL and AI were deployed in the same overzealous fashion, with the latter producing almost as much snake oil as the blockchain scene.
If anything, it's the FOMO-ing developers of these techs that are looking for problems.
> NoSQL and AI were deployed in the same overzealous fashion, with the latter producing almost as much snake oil as the blockchain scene.
You must be kidding when you say that AI produced as much snake oil as cryptos. Sure, there were/are startups using AI as a selling point when there is not much behind, but in most cases AI actually solves real world problems and adds value. Cryptos are stricly a negative-sum game and ponzi schemes.
I am not kidding. I work in the AI industry and I'd go so far as so say that less than half of deployed AI is properly tuned and not overfit. Tons of companies rushed to market half-baked "AI" solutions built by the cheapest "data scientist" they could find.
Just because it's corporate snake-oil doesn't mean it isn't snake oil.
Tell me how to solve decentralized consensus without having a blockchain, and I'll be the first to drop all my work with it.
Tell me how someone living in a country with heavy capital controls can participate in the global economy on equal footing with someone from a more developed country without blockchain, and you might be a candidate for a Nobel Prize.
Or tell me simply how someone can make a living with work that threatens the status quo without worrying about being ostracized.
If you want to have any kind of hedge against the continuous, systemic institutional failures, you can not simply try to build another system that puts another institution at the top.
> Tell me how to solve decentralized consensus without having a blockchain, and I'll be the first to drop all my work with it.
I doubt you will, but you asked, so: byzantine Paxos.
The point of the person you are responding to is that solving decentralized consensus is only an academic exercise. If your country wants to prevent your from participating in an economy, it can; the only recourse is political.
Okay, I should've added "permissionless" to the list of desired properties. If you can a priori choose who gets to participate you´d have a point.
> If your country wants to prevent your from participating in an economy, it can
I think that the eternally losing "War on Drugs" should be a lesson that shows this is simply not true. Also, consider how Black Markets are a thing in authoritarian places, not free ones.
So, no, as much as a country can make it difficult for others, they can not outright stop anyone without significant cost to themselves.
Standardized APIs solve centralization. The use of Merkle trees to store way too much data and make a distributed computer slower than any individual node has nothing to do with that.
No, they don't. They still don't ensure data availability, consistency and you still have to trust the API provider, a third party. Web3 does away will all that. You just use the service.
Decentralization itself is what gets you availability, not the blockchain structure. A consensus algorithm is what gets you consistency, not a blockchain structure. There's no need to store your data in the most wasteful way to store data and perform compute to get these features.
The blockchain data structure makes the data it encodes tamper-proof. It makes historical data immutable, and it makes the current state of a system and the state transitions that led to the current state fully auditable in a shared-data context. These features enable applications that might otherwise incentivize illicit data tampering (such as applications that deal with asset account balances and ownership records) to be decentralized. I am unaware of another solution to this particular problem.
"Zero trust" is meant to refer to the data layer: because the current state of a blockchain system can be re-generated deterministically from the historical data—which is immutable and fully auditable—you don't have to trust anyone's version of the current system state, even if you are not yourself currently keeping a copy of it.
These technologies do not solve all of the moral and ethical problems that humanity faces, but I don't think anyone is claiming that they do. Blockchains don't stop people from deceiving each other, and they don't make people smarter so that they entirely avoid introducing bugs into their software, and they don't stop people from trying to steal from one another.
But they do make it possible to decentralize high-value data records that would otherwise need to live in high-security environments controlled by governments or well-capitalized businesses that would also need to be trusted 100% not to tamper with those records.
How does decentralization give you availability? You need a financial incentive to make data available, that's where the tokens come in.
Also stop conflating all crypto with scams, it's a moot point and borders on arguing in bad faith. People use good old money to run scams and rob people all the time. The fact that people use the tool with malicious intents doesn't detract from the value of the tool itself.
I personally don't care about DeFi, I only care about the technological aspect. The tokens are just a mean to use the decentralized service. And again, people misusing the tool does not detract from the merits of the tool.
