I keep saying this, but:<p>Bitcoin is well over 10 years old by now. In 10 years, the internet was already clearly adding a ton of value all over the place. Bitcoin is not really a 'young technology' anymore, and the only thing it has enabled so far is risky, unregulated investment strategies, and an staggering amount of crime.
I kinda question the scientific methodology of "take the first N Google results". Not only for obvious reasons, but also for the reason that a lot of infrastructural projects that have a lot of real world effects are not routinely discussed in the press (because they are extremely boring to everybody but specialists, also because nobody but the specialists knows they exist, or understands how they work) and thus would not show up at the top results. What would show up is more marketing than technology. And, of course, since we are living through the initial hype cycle, there would be a lot of marketing to sort through. Limiting oneself to look only at the most hyped projects virtually guarantees you never see the deeper infrastructural ones. I am not passing judgement on how good are those or how many of them use blockchains properly - I am just saying the methodology used here is doomed to miss them. It's a good entertaining reading, but it's more gossip column than industry research quality.<p>That said, it is true that companies like Chainalysis (it is in no way alone in this field, of course), which bring visibility, analytics, risk assessment and so on into the blockchain world, have a real world impact. I think the accusation of "censoring transactions" is misplaced - first of all, on a decentralized blockchain you can not really censor a transaction (you can do it if you're a centralized exchange gatekeeping an access route to the chain, but that's a different thing) - but the impact is there and is going to grow nevertheless.
Ah yes, a blockchain thread on HN. It doesn't get more black and white than this. As a neutral person, I love these. However, there's so much personal trauma on both sides that I sincerely would like to give all commenter here a hug and tell them it will pass and it will end up OK for everybody. Please don't forget that we're all just people on here and that none of us have all the information and context matters.<p>Let's all respect that some people work on this and try to come up something good for everybody. And also, some people don't or have had bad experiences. Love <3
I work in this industry and have heard of only a few of these projects. The idea that this is a "top" list is ridiculous. This is more a testament to how messed up Google's search results are for niche subjects.<p>Dapper Labs is legit. Steem was a 2017-era source of ridicule within crypto. Gemini is just a conventional crypto exchange (like Coinbase). Algorand has some interesting tech but was a mixed bag from launch. The rest of these projects are totally obscure.
You know how “the brightest minds of our generation spent the last decade on ads”?<p>I’m just glad they clearly stuck with ads and let all these scam projects rot.
What a waste of time to read.<p>Blogger randomly selects other bloggers garbage article to <i>hand select</i> a <i>comprehensive </i> list of projects no one has ever heard of and rightly bashes them. Of course, ostensibly this is representative of all projects (even those that actually have a following)<p>Beyond a bore.<p>A ledger is the oldest (Sumer) recorded instrument used in organized society. We now have an immutable ledger that requires zero intermediaries.<p>How is it possible for people to fail in understanding that value?<p>Can anyone speak to the timeframe after 99-00 implosion of the internet when people finally stopped claiming it was a sham?<p>I just want to know when to expect this kind of boring shortsightedness to taper off
It would be nice to read an article on blockchain projects that are actually used in the real world and have real impact on human life. Assuming such projects exist.<p>By now, most people have a healthy skepticism of blockchain projects.<p>All that said, kudos to the author for spending a good amount of time looking into these projects.
Extremely relevant simple chart:<p><i>NIST's answer to "Do you need a blockchain?"</i>:
<a href="https://m.imgur.com/a/RlUj9Ed" rel="nofollow">https://m.imgur.com/a/RlUj9Ed</a>
This would have been much more useful if the author had described what each project was intended to do, rather than just dump on it.<p>IMHO the use cases that make some sense for blockchain are identity, ownership certificates and providence, and trustless exchange/settlement between institutions. ie where you want ot be sure you got your money, even if your counterparty goes bust overnight, eg for forex settlement, or anywhere some kind of escrow is currently used.
> Algorand, Gemini & Circle: Crypto only<p>> Not real-world projects. As discussed in the introduction, I am only discussing projects that have real-world effects outside of cryptocurrency balances. Gemini, Circle as exchanges, and Algorand as a Blockchain implementation, don’t qualify here – they don’t actually add real-world utility other than moving tokens around.<p>Interesting take. These are very different "projects", but I don't see why they don't qualify as "having real-world effects".<p>Gemini and Circle are corporations that provide stablecoins backed by USD reserves (gUSD and USDC). The tokens these companies have created can be moved around on various blockchains without an intermediary and used to pay for goods and services.<p>Algorand is a blockchain protocol that can be used to build decentralized applications (similar to Ethereum). There are many "real-world" projects built on Algorand, for example lofty.ai (tokenized real-estate investing).<p>I don't see how the author defines "real-world utility" and why Algorand, Gemini and Circle wouldn't qualify. It seems like the author is trying to cherry-pick a few failed blockchain projects in an attempt to smear the whole industry.
I think Helium is a pretty well known, real-world blockchain project.<p><a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/06/technology/helium-cryptocurrency-uses.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.nytimes.com/2022/02/06/technology/helium-cryptoc...</a>
I have an extremely low opinion of blockchain/crypto, but in the interest of fairness, I did read an FT piece a few months ago about how banks are apparently actually using the blockchain for currency trading:<p>"HSBC and Wells Fargo are cutting out a key part of the currency market’s infrastructure from some trades after the two banks agreed to settle transactions directly on blockchain technology.<p>From Monday, they will use blockchain technology to reconcile and pay out on deals in dollars, sterling, euro and Canadian dollars between the two banks, using HSBC’s FX Everywhere platform. The agreement means they will bypass CLS, the nearly two-decades-old utility that central banks urge market participants to use to neutralise the risk of certain trade failures"<p><a href="https://www.ft.com/content/1a4dcaf5-2b4b-4f0b-8c58-a8fa173f24b3" rel="nofollow">https://www.ft.com/content/1a4dcaf5-2b4b-4f0b-8c58-a8fa173f2...</a>
<a href="https://archive.ph/qs8Cg" rel="nofollow">https://archive.ph/qs8Cg</a> non-paywalled link
The primary purpose of blockchains is to prevent a central authority of regulating a currency, anything beyond it is hype. You're discarding the technology as whole without taking into regard its original intent.
You have to understand some nuances of the technology to be able to fully appreciate the emptiness of the claim made by BurstIQ to have a “blockchain-enabled big data” system.<p>Based on the tech, this claim just makes no sense, and it doesn’t surprise me that all of their job ads are for normal sql skills. Trying to query a blockchain you are trying to reconstruct the state of an event-sourced system by replaying all the events (ie without using CQRS). It is incredibly painful to answer even basic questions, so anyone with an analytic question to answer ends up building/using an indexer and writing the results to a sql database so they can actually use the data is a flexible way (ie they use CQRS effectively). Source: I recently wrote a blockchain indexer to answer queries because I couldn’t do what I wanted directly by querying the chain even though all the data is there. It walks a chain using RPC queries and writes the results to a postgres database.<p>In and of itself this doesn’t invalidate the potential niche usefulness of a blockchain btw (say you need to share data between parties who don’t trust each other without having a central party because noone would trust that party) but the blockchain doesn’t in any sense enable the “big data”, in actual fact you are managing to achieve data analysis in spite of the blockchain.<p>Also, it’s 2022, can we just let the term “big data” have a decent burial at this point?
> Money transfer use-cases would fall directly in the category of “crypto-only”. For as long as Bitcoin has existed, this has been touted as a great use-case — but it never really materialised.<p>So Stellar and MoneyGram are not <i>'Money Transfer Use Cases'</i>? [0] If not, why did they partner on this in the first place if they didn't think this was a possible or a feasible use case?<p>On NFTs, Blockchain domains like ENS (Ethereum Name Service [1], Handshake [2], etc) are the only valid NFTs that have a use case. Seem to work fine for Namecheap [3], Encirca [4], etc, with millions of these domains registered so far. Once again, 90% of all NFTs, including the JPEG ones will die with the remaining 10% still surviving including blockchain domains.<p>But yes as always, the extreme anti-crypto boosters like ghuntley will do anything to boost the most ridiculous of posts. Including this one.<p>Oh dear.<p>[0] <a href="https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/moneygram-launches-pioneering-global-crypto-to-cash-service-on-the-stellar-network-301565815.html" rel="nofollow">https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/moneygram-launches-...</a><p>[1] <a href="https://ens.domains" rel="nofollow">https://ens.domains</a><p>[2] <a href="https://handshake.org" rel="nofollow">https://handshake.org</a><p>[3] <a href="https://www.namecheap.com/domains/handshake-domains/" rel="nofollow">https://www.namecheap.com/domains/handshake-domains/</a><p>[4] <a href="https://www.encirca.com/" rel="nofollow">https://www.encirca.com/</a>
Or read the bitcoin white paper, understand the tech and then you'd know these are all scams and move on with your life. Opps I mentioned bitcoin and forgot about "blockchains" immaculate conception
> TL;DR: The top #1 Google result for “blockchain production users” (and related queries) lists 34 individual “real world blockchain” projects. One would expect some actual functioning projects that have an impact on every-day consumers — outside of cryptocurrency & NFTs. Looking into all 34, I found that 13 are already dead (including one that has been killed by the SEC), 6 are only useful within the crypto & NFT ecosystems and not in the “real world” and 14 use Blockchain in a way where removing the blockchain would not impact functionality at all, or make the product better. The remaining project is Chainalysis, which has real-world impact by helping law enforcement de-anonymizing blockchain users.<p>So basically the author found nothing good (and I haven't either, though I commend their depth of investigation). I'd be open of <i>objective</i> approaches any objectors would recommend doing differently to find a top 34
The linked dtube post is interesting: <a href="https://steemit.com/witness-update/@quochuy/your-previous-d-tube-videos-don-t-play-anymore-how-to-prevent-this-from-happening-again-without-technical-skills" rel="nofollow">https://steemit.com/witness-update/@quochuy/your-previous-d-...</a><p>> Number of pins: 1286<p>> Repo size: 52.87 GB<p>> Rate In: 21.38 KB/s<p>> Rate Out: 6.49 KB/s<p>6kb/s out rate. For 1.2k videos.
Google has repeatedly restricted crypto advertising and down ranked legitimate Cerrito enterprises. Building this article using search visibility is going to give you local (US) results, and suppress a lot of the important ones who don't use that phraseology to describe what they do. Americans build your own biases always, then act like they don't exist
There's a simple "bs filter": ultimately, a block chain is just a simple data structure. So when I read about hype stories, I mentally replace<p><pre><code> s/blockchain/linked lists/g;
s/artificial intelligence/regression/g;
</code></pre>
If the story still makes sense, good; most of the time, it turns into a laugh.
IMO as an inflation-hedge and as a payments network (once PoS or layer-2 gets going) is going to be the crypto killer-app. Possibly even a reserve currency. It shouldn't be all of your portfolio but I think it's a reasonable hedge given the current direction (or even current state) of most major economies.
I am not into crypto... it seems a bit too 'gambly' to me... but I'm kinda wondering why they didn't list BAT. Built into a browser (Brave), perhaps not as decentralized as the rest, but I think it seems to be doing what it is supposed to...
I’m surprised there’s no mention of R3/Corda. There’s a lot of good real-world application of blockchain in their portfolio, which us effectively a consortium of banks working together. Documentary trade finance is where blockchain finds decent uses.
I used to think that Bitcoin has no assets underneath it like all experts says. However, I have changed my views. There are ultra-libertarian type folks who will rather risk tremendous losses than give in to their principles. These are probably 5-10% of the folks in US. Then there are people hit by a corrupt governments and high inflation (> 20% yoy). These are probably a 5-10% of folks. This <i>IS</i> the “assets” underneath bitcoin. In all, I think the value of Bitcoin eventually stabilize at around 1% of world GDP eventually given these reasons (regardless of it’s actual utility to make transactions). This comes down to about $40k per Bitcoin in 2020 money. It would obviously not wise to not sell if it ever reaches 5X of this or $200k in 2020 money.
The author's criteria for 'good' projects seem very reasonable. So all you blockchain yeah-sayers, convince me that sensible, useful, <i>REAL</i> applications exist - things that make the author's criteria (no vague "in xxx they use it" statements, please).
quote -- It should be noted that this (ed. <i>extra dead project death</i>) was in 2020, and it’s still listed when google searching for “blockchain production users”<p>ghosts in the machine
What is this crap lol. TA on the first 16 Google results for a series of buzzwords. Good luck finding a thing good there for any industry. Someone should parody this with "real world users e commerce"