this post was submitted on 21 Oct 2024
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Blockchain and crypto were worse. „AI” has some actual use even if it’s way overblown.
Blockchain has many valuable uses. A distributed zero trust ledger is useful. Sadly the finance scammers and the digital beanie baby collectors attracted all the marketing money.
The idea has merit, in theory -- but in practice, in the vast majority of cases, having a trusted regulator managing the system, who can proactively step in to block or unwind suspicious activity, turns out to be vastly preferable to the "code is law" status quo of most blockchain implementations. Not to mention most potential applications really need a mechanism for transactions to clear in seconds, rather than minutes to days, and it'd be preferable if they didn't need to boil the oceans dry in the process of doing so.
If I was really reaching, I could maybe imagine a valid use case for say, a hypothetical, federated open source game that needed to have a trusted way for every node to validate the creation and trading of loot and items, that could serve as a layer of protection against cheating nodes duping items, for instance. But that's insanely niche, and for nearly every other use case a database held by a trusted entity is faster, simpler, safer, more efficient, and easier to manage.
Your second point of trading loot and items got me thinking about my Steam CS:GO skins. Why should I trust a centralized entity like Steam who could at any moment decide to delete all my skins or remove my account for whatever reason with my skins, vs storing those skins in a wallet on a public blockchain for example to keep it's value and always allow trading? Ofc there will always be a "centralized" smart contract but at least they can't make changes to it if the smart contract code is audited ,
In that case (as is the case with most games) the near-worst case scenario is that you are no worse off trusting Valve with the management of item data than you would be if it was in a public block chain. Why? Because those items are valueless outside the context of the commercial game they are used in. If Valve shuts down CS:GO tomorrow, owning your skins as a digital asset on a blockchain wouldn't give you any more protection than the current status quo, because those skins are entirely dependent on the game itself to be used and viewed -- it'd be akin to holding stock certificates for a company that's already gone bankrupt and been liquidated: you have a token proving ownership of something that doesn't exist anymore.
Sure, there's the edge case that if your Steam account got nukes from orbit by Gaben himself along with all its purchase and trading history you could still cash out on your skin collection, Conversely, having Valve -- which, early VAC-ban wonkiness notwithstanding, has proven itself to be a generally-trustworthy operator of a digital games storefront for a couple decades now -- hold the master database means that if your account got hacked and your stuff shifted off the account to others for profit, it's much easier for Valve support to simply unwind those transactions and return your items to you. Infamously, in the case of blockchain ledgers, reversing a fraudulent transaction often requires forking the blockchain.