I'm trying to understand more about blockchain technology, but I struggle with seeing where it's useful and where it isn't. Would love to hear from people who have actually done some work in the area.
Blockchains increase trust and immutability at cost of scaling, speed, expense, over other digital systems. If you don't have people trying to fool you by doublespending (it's like a race condition) then you don't need a blockchain.<p>Blockchains aren't just for currency, but their best use case is surely currency, for only the currency project can recuperate the massive externalities (costs) of running the system, for the profit margin is almost 100 percent. What that means is, for a blockchain to make sense for you, you really, really need to need the anti attacker parts of it for it to make sense over any other system.<p>Current real world uses are timestamping, (recently Peter Todd timestamped all of archive.org, so people can't go back and make changes to fool people.) Bitcoin (currency). And as a tier 1 trust layer to support tier 2 protocols that have faster, cheaper, more stateful transactions (counterparty, mastercoin, rsk, sidechains, lightning, etc. a few of those need opcodes added to the btc network.)<p>Trust is expensive, bankers hours are comedic, much of the world loses large percentage of currency value every year, bitcoin can solve much of that. Databases and merkletrees already do a great job if you don't have advanced attackers. Blockchains are much less exciting than bitcoin.
As far as I can tell the only current real-world use case for blockchain technology is flight capital from China (<a href="https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/01/19/2182669/chinese-capital-flight-is-back/" rel="nofollow">https://ftalphaville.ft.com/2017/01/19/2182669/chinese-capit...</a> - see graph at the end).
Black and gray uses only? Create a temporary environment, allow two users enter by blockchain, let them exchange their sh*t inside and destroy the environment after that. Financials from the beginning to the end then, insiders job.
I'm considering entering the space as a NCG, luckily I have good connections and experience in the space. My alternative is to leverage my startup experience and just work in some other industry that interests me. My one doubt with blockchain is that there isn't a ton of non-enterprise money in the space. Seems like founding in just about any other industry is likely more profitable and more technically reasonable.