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What exactly is blockchain useful for?


Being a single source of truth which changes only according to certain rules, and not at the whims of some administrator. In short: accounting.

It solves a lot of headaches compared to having each stakeholder maintain their own database and then do pairwise syncs in hopes of convergence.


Isn't an issue with Bitcoin that it's actually controlled by the miners, so they could collude to change some of the issuance rules?


I'd rephrase slightly:

Bitcoin's problem is that, since it's controlled by the miners, they're unlikely to change the issuance rules. Adequate security can be had at a far lower cost, but that's a change that would damage their investment in mining hardware, so the miners will never do it.

I hope one day we start valuing abstractions based on the desirability of their externalities. After such a shift, bitcoin will look pretty silly--who would want use waste-electricity-coin when they could instead use capture-carbon-coin or go-to-mars-coin? But it would seem that we're not there yet.


At what point do large AI players have enough GPUs to take over the blockchain?


That would be 51%. I'm not a big fan of bitcoin, so I haven't tried to forecast it in terms of years.

Asic miners outperform GPU's though, so it would have to be an awful large pile of GPU's.


If it solved these headaches why didn't it catch on?


I used to work for a company which later got bought by Fiserv (a large payments provider). I had these headaches re: transaction data. Wrote a lot of SQL to reconcile the pairwise sync problem. I tried to convince them that this is a problem for a blockchain, but I grew impatient and left.

Just a few weeks ago Fiserv launched a stablecoin on Solana: https://investors.fiserv.com/newsroom/detail/2848/fiserv-lau... I doubt they listened to me, probably just came to the conclusion independently.

So I'd say that it has caught on, just in a way that doesn't involve the users' preferences as much as I'd like. Because it's not like Fiserv is going to let their end users transact with any of the other assets on Solana. They'll wrap it in an interface that just calls it "$" and the user will be none the wiser.




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