Real Blockchain

12 April, 2018

So yeah 98% of blockchain / smart contract idea/startups might be scams. That happens but it’s fun to try and figure out what’s real.

Fun

Lightning github / Raiden Remember when bitcoin was going to be a currency? That seems so 2012 now. Well maybe it actually can be you just only go to the block chain as settlment and do everything else through pre commited channels. I don’t think increasing the blocksize is anything real. Ligntining is getting to mainnet but Eaiden actually seems even futher along than I thought so need to check it out.
DNS replacement So you could argue that ICANN has actually done a fine job. Or you could say their arbitrary, rentseeking and subject to government pressure. Dns isn’t that big but seems like a template for some other areas.
Identity I think facebook/google are too ensconsed here but who knows maybe a hail mary works from time to time. A global identity seperate from government/companies has some real advantages.
Interbank settlement. This may not be on bitcoin or ethereum but it seems like it’s a giant mess today. So it seems like the big banks will just move to some distributed ledger to end around the government. Maybe some reneging on the block chain will be the next bear sterns.
Content Origination Doesn’t settle itself but might be convincing evidence if my hash appeared on the block chain before yours and our edit difference isn’t that big.

Oracles/Augur/Prediction Markets. Yeah so oracles are hard to trust but will maybe get there eventually. I don’t think people actually like prediction markets outside the autistic community we’ll see. Best chance is the money behind sports gambling just forces this to happen. Still need to write the nba finals smart contract with crappy espn oracle.
Tokens!. I was kind of amazed how few of these I knew. Maybe I need to catch up or maybe it’s mostly BS. The #1 token by market cap EOS seems to be makign a lot of computing claims but I haven’t really read any articles about it. This cracked me up Q:”What does EOS stand for?” A: “We believe that EOS means different things to different people.”. W00f
Golem and Filecoin seem more real but do peoeple really want to airbnb their machines?

uport seems like almost a real product. That’s neat.
ipfs which seems like the filesystem that will back filecoing seem pretty cool git plus bit torrent == neat.