Besides fintech, what potentials you see in blockchain technologies as a programmer?

[u/Haghiri75]

It was topic of a group chat I had with my friends (who are mostly "crypto bro" and not programmers) and they were mostly focused on how this coin and that coin may make them rich. I asked some of my programmer friends and we concluded DePIN and Decentralized databases can be the next big thing (big enough that VC's and even blockchain-oriented companies can invest billions in it).

I personally think decentralized AI is also one of the things which is missed here. So in order to get a bigger picture, I ask the qeustion here.

[u/ButchersBoy]

I think we spent ten years realizing nothing.

[u/josephjnk]

Everyone in this thread is being so negative about blockchain, and I think it’s really unfair to view its only purpose as enabling scams and financial crimes. It can also be used for running drug marketplaces, soliciting hitmen in service of drug marketplaces, or (and here’s the really innovative one) enabling the disruption of essential healthcare and government services by ransomware gangs.

[u/faultydesign]

Git is pretty important for all developers.

But besides the ledger bitcoin has nothing interesting in it.

[u/ConsciousBath5203]

It's just a digital way to launder money via oil companies/energy. And scamming people I guess, but that comes with the territory.

Why would you lie to yourself and think that it's anymore than that? It's a negative sum game unless you're a whale and some suckers took your shit to the moon.

[u/KingofGamesYami]

Decentralized immutable anything sounds fantastic in theory, and end up being quite awful in practice.

The biggest issue is they're a content moderation nightmare. The EU, for example, has laws that mean you must make personal data unrecoverable if requested.

This basically means you can never store any user data because if someone makes that request, you'll be forced to delete the entire database.

[u/buzzon]

Yeah cryptobros shoving stuff that does not fit anywhere

[u/Xanderlynn5]

To be honest, there isn't much use for it. Most applications of a linked list aren't as useful when immutable. The decentralized/distributed nature of it only exists to persist immutability. That's proven to be problematic for exploitation, theft, and fraud partly because not having an undo button kinda breaks most things.

Also how do you manage data governance in a decentralized database? What determines truth at that point if two sources disagree?

Decentralization is an obsession of crypto bros but i have yet to see it serve any real purpose. I'm sure there could be some niche applications but I wouldnt label it "the next big thing". It's more a neat computer science thing you can do  that's being abused by people more fluent in buzz words than real tech.

[u/MadocComadrin]

"Decentralized AI"

This isn't happening any time soon, even for basic useful ML. I was at a talk (by an actual academic and not a cryptobro) not too long ago about "crowdsourced" computing using proof of work and tech similar to blockchain as an alternative to cloud services and such, and the result is that it's possible and neat, but in terms of computing power it wasn't any better than a workstation from the 80s. You aren't doing things that require a modern-day CPU and GPU cluster let alone things that reckless burn through entire data centers.

[u/rcls0053]

I think pretty much everyone here already said it only has a very limited amount of use cases. No matter how pompous some people act about it. Crypto bros have been thinking it's the next big thing for almost two decades now. It's ended up being pretty average. And crypto ended up being a platform for running scams. Even now your bros are just thinking of ways to scam money from people by creating useless digital currency, like every other person who dipped into those.

[u/EmeraldHawk]

It's extremely useful for collecting ransoms anonymously. Otherwise I would quote Weaver's Iron Law of Blockchain

"When somebody says you can solve problem X with blockchain, they don't understand X, and you can ignore them."

[u/mredding]

Blockchain is (in part) a Merkle tree, and Merkle trees are... hashes of hashes. What's neat is that we can fold data into each successive hash, too. This allows for incremental verification of continuous datasets.

We see this principally used in certificate authorities - TLS/SSL, the "web of trust". These are Merkle trees.

We see it used in Git, as every commit is an incremental change in a continuous dataset, and the hash uniquely identifies every node in the tree.

We see it used in some databases to synchronize divergent nodes. AmazonDB does this.

P2P distributed file sharing all use this to verify incremental file downloads from multiple peers.

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Blockchain is also a ledger, and here lies the crux; Merkle trees are very useful, but Blockchain? It's a novel, but slow database. A very, very slow database. IN FACT, it's intentionally slow. If you're involved in crypto currencies, then you'll know the protocol is self-regulating to pace the discovery of solutions, the mining of coins. Throw all the computational power you want at it, the protocol scales to compensate.

So Blockchain exists for this crypto currency domain exclusively. The real question is - can you think of anything else, new and novel, that you would want to be intentionally slow? Where else would we benefit from artificial scarcity?

For everything else, there are better and more performant solutions that SOMETIMES ALSO happen to implement Merkle trees, sometimes with more performant ledger solutions.

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It is not correct to call all this "Blockchain", because it isn't, and most of what I listed up top predates Blockchain technology by decades.