I have wet dreams about a new text based mesh internet powered by the gemini protocol. Imagine, if you will, instead of paying monthly to your ISP/cell service provider to acess the internet, that instead you bought an 'internet box' once. Where each router/gateway acts both as a self-hosting site for the user, and transmits this site text data to other local routers through LoRaWAN. There are many technical challenges to this kind of networks, one being "how do I check that all other routers have an up-to-date version of any one site?" and blockchain technology seems to fit nicely for that particular issue.
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Asset Tokenization and Smart Contracts are two things that will be increasingly used in Finance. That is why the recent BIS report on CBDCs included both of those as essential features of a Central Bank Digital Currency.
What Blockchain does is provide these features of a digital currency in a way that doesn't require a trusted intermediary. This makes Blockchains resistant to censorship in a way that a central bank digital currency can never truly guarantee. It is true that a centralization system like a database or ledger can be faster, more efficient and more secure but that you will always have to trust that provider of that service that they will continue operating in a manner that is congruent with what a user may want.
A recent example of this would be the news that Ubisoft is deleting inactive accounts on Uplay, which is potentially resulting in many users losing access to games they bought on that platform. Where the rights to those game tokenized on a Blockchain or CBDC, the users could potentially redeem that on another platform. Another example would be the case of the user losing his 900 hour character in Red Dead Redemption after Google shutdown stadia. Had that player's character been tokenized as an NFT he might have the capacity to move it off of stadia and onto another game platform.
Get a little nervous about your Steam Game collection worth 1000s of dollars that is completely locked into Valve's ecosystem? How about a decentralized, immutable and censorship-resistant record of your ownership of those games? That is what asset tokenization is about and it will become more important in the future as our lives and our assets become more digital.
Then there are multitude of uses for smart contracts which, again, don't require a blockchain provided you are ok with relying on a trusted intermediary to execute the contract as it was termed. Given that contracts by their nature often involve agreement between organization or individual with diverging interests, it almost a certainty that having an immutable, censorship resistant network to run those smart contracts is desirable.
If you take a longer historical view, there have long been strong opinions about how we should base our currency. Because money impacts us all so viscerally, even the most uninformed develop deep seated emotional stances about very obscure topics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cross_of_Gold_speech
This link is an example of a historical moment where a stance taken against the gold standard was influential in national elections in the US.
The people who would have been emotionally exercised about bimetalism are probably the same people who we call crypto-bros today.
In all, the furor over blockchain, especially currency and NFT, has yielded heat but no light. Where’s the killer application? It never takes this long for a truly useful technology to find that killer app, not in today’s technology environment. Maybe it just isn’t that useful and people should calm down?
Nothing about cryptocurrencies, NFTs, or the "Blockchain" are beneficial to human society. They only serve as a means for immoral people to acquire misappropriated funds.
So the actual tech behind could lead to some interesting ways to utilize it, but it’s admittedly squandered on cryptocurrencies and shitty NFT “art”.
Like, you could probably get rid of identity theft being an issue if you had unique tokens that would have your personal info like your legal name, birthdate, SSN, etc to ensure that it’s you and not somebody pretending to be you. Instead of entering in this info, you could just share the necessary tokens with the other party - so if a bank needed your info, for example, you could just give them the tokens containing the different info they need into their wallet. No idea how feasible that would be, but I do think there’s more actually creative and useful ways to utilize the blockchain tech versus just relegating it to shitcoins and ape art.
What you're describing kinda just sounds like ID cards or passwords... I mean, these can be stolen, falsified ot lost, but even assuming the "falsified" part is and remains impossible, couldn't it be possible to obtain or duplicate someone's token? The crudest example I could think of would be someone just stealing a computer on which someone else's crypto keys are saved, but through hacking there'd probably be more ways to do it...
From my understanding (and it could be wrong tbh, this is a bit out of my wheelhouse), you cannot duplicate NFTs - it’s already recorded on the blockchain, so it’ll be the only unique one on the chain. Even if somebody were to create another token with your info, you can still say that the duplicated token is not your token because you can prove when the duplicated one was created after your token was, and can even prove each transaction done with your specific token. Plus, to even hack the blockchain, iirc it would require one party to have over 50% of the processes running it - which is reportedly hard to do, so take that for what you will.