I personally think what they do for general audience is way too niche and it all starts to make sense when you massively decentralize and switch to crypto for everything regarding money. Now do we see a massive surge in big P2P decentralized systems for end-users? I don't see it. There are few alternatives for some chat apps here and there and that's it. So maybe it's just too early. Prime time of this tech is yet to come. If someone builds a huge P2P cryptopowered platform level of Steam or YouTube that's when you should expect to hear about all this stuff solving real problems.

Money got involved and fucked everything up.

As usual.

Its in the cloud

I don’t know. But apparently “fintech” is still a thing - or at least there are ghost job descriptions for it.

Blockchain is just a ledger. Most systems don't need a ledger, they need a database. It was a solution looking for a problem in most cases and the marketing/business types don't listen to the engineers if the engineers are even in the room.

Turned out that those in control of the tech could control the tech, so contrary to the hype nothing was free, decentralized and scalable. Never.

Vaporware turns out to be vapor. Shocking.

AI became the new buzzword

The money behind the hype went into "AI" instead

From what I've heard, the biggest problem is the inputs. You can write a 'smart' contract that says 'if I get a pizza, user9000005 pays user30000004 XXX bitcoins' but there's no direct sensor for 'user9000005 has a pizza.' Someone has to manually put it in. At that point, it's not automated. It's just a payment processor with way less certainty, so why bother?

AI is the new crypto, crypto still here but its largely used by shady people and conservatives love to invest in a scam, because they play it like its stock, but its easier to understand and less convoluted than a stock, buys, puts,,whatever. the threat of CRYPTO has largely faded into background.

Not an expert, but IMO, it’s because it was misused. Cryptocurrency is just one application of blockchain technology, but people equated blockchain to crypto, and crypto was turned into an investment scheme instead of an actual currency. Then came NFTs, which people turned into rugpull scams. And news of the volatility of cryptocurrency and all those NFT scams drove away any chance of regular people adopting anything blockchain-related.

So whenever there's a new tech innovation, there are two instances of it.

The first is the actual tech innovation, that often finds a specific use in a few industries, then just becomes part of how things are.

The second is the venture capitalist innovation. It has nothing to do with the technical stuff (as long as the tech is complex enough to impress the average 5th grader). It's more a concept or an idea, and a lot of big promises of unending potential. And as soon as the potential is there, stock prices go up. And that's the only point.

The second one blows up big, then deflates quietly when the next thing takes everyone's attention away. The actual tech innovation usually just finds its niche and quietly chugs away.

Any time anybody talks about a "tech revolution" or some similar word vomit, they're presenting the second thing. Currently we're on "AI" (i.e. LLMs), which will become a niche novelty when the next big thing comes along (I give it a few more years).

Also, NFTs. Wasn't there a supposed use case for contract authenticity or something?

Oh that? It was bullshit just like AI.

Out of those I only know blockchain being used in spain as a way to ensure legality of accounting books, and that business are not commiting fraud by deleting invoices. Not in a public ledger or anything, just a hashed chain that they need to send to irs equivalent.

Nothing because it was all bullshit because the underlying technology is just fundamentally flawed.

This isn't news, lots of people always saw this when Bitcoin came out, but tech bro's kept pushing it right until AI came out, then the completely forgot it ever existed

The vast majority of it was driven by speculation and outright scams. The few who were genuinely trying to make a currency couldn't make something competitve with existing systems, as they all ended up with the same problems and then some. Usually, blockchain based systems are very slow, expensive, centralized (in who has control over it), hard to regulate, and insecure. The only real advantage they have, is being harder to modify records for, meaning they're less private and more traceable, if that can even be considered a plus for currency.

It's in the same place as those NFTs that sold for hundreds of thousands of dollars.

1. It's actively transforming global agriculture. While the USA failed to innovate Canada has integrated blockchain into it's agricultural sector to facilitate unparalleled traceability.

2. Blockchain transactions are painfully slow compared to other payment processers. BTC is only 7 transactions a second. VISA handles 65,000 transactions per second. That's one of the major reasons we're not seeing more widespread adoption.

3. Crypto currency isn't backed by a nation's GDP; which is effectively the mechanism that gives money value. However USA just passed laws recategorizing crypto issuers as financial institutions; that must comply with regulations such as having a % of their liabilities(crypto) as collateral (Cash). So we shall see where things go.

Expensive and useless. Decentralization was an illusion and they don't solve any real problems

Idk, they’re currently in use at financial companies and adoption is increasing. There’s still a lot of regulatory uncertainty though.

https://www.web3isgoinggreat.com/

It's being used for what it's very good at. That means very little applications (although there are some), on a different scale, and certainly nothing that can promise a quick buck for free. Basically, empty promises just farted out.

Most of the real world usage were bogus, either because they did not actually work as advertised, or because they had lots of negative properties for businesses (imagine a system that would try to prevent fraud if done well… nobody wants that). There's also the issue that a lot of "funky, interesting stuff", once you filtered out the bad and the ugly, were just… less efficient, less useful versions of what we already used to do.

There are still people clinging to it (and the recent fuckery in the US might revive that… although for all the bad reasons), but the press moved forward to the next thing.

It's still out there and going amazing!!! Despite the lack of mainstream media coverage, blockchain and smart contacts couldn't be doing better.

On an unrelated topic, does anyone want to buy some NFTs? I can give you a really good deal. No take-backs, though.

It doesn't have the backing of a powerful government unlike fiat does, so its effectively worthless in the eyes of the average person.

AI has taken the spotlight, but this is a good thing.

They were desperately waiting for you to figure those enough promises and now that AI has dominated the narrative, they've either skunk off to try and get in on that, or finally just cut their losses and tried to rebuild their ruined lives.

Things are still happening, it's just slow to adopt.

E.g.

https://www.ledgerinsights.com/nasdaqs-calypso-now-supports-blockchain-based-collateral-workflows/

https://investor.visa.com/news/news-details/2024/Visa-Introduces-the-Visa-Tokenized-Asset-Platform/default.aspx

There's a lot of work being done around tokenizing stocks. The 3 day settlement period would become instant for example. But that's no small feat to implement. That could be a decades long endeavor between all exchanges for example.

Also until recently, the SEC was hostile towards it all in the USA, with some pivotal multi year long court cases only being resolved in the past year or so where the SEC lost. (E.g is Ethereum a security or not? Well, now it is not. Now we also have the ETFs)

Ethereum only recently had some pretty big upgrades as well, which are going to be key to unlocking growth potential as well. A couple months ago they had a peak of 800 transactions per second, and the road map of these upgrades going to >100k (note these are including the level 2 networks that use the L1 ethereum for their security, like Arbitrum. Level 1 is somewhere between 15-20 right now. As L1 grows, L2s also grow)

I don't know when the killer app that brings everyone into daily use will happen, but more and more behind the scenes things will slowly adopt it and you won't even realize it. Like maybe when you do a bank to bank transfer, it'll be that Visa VTAP thing I linked above, and it won't take 1 to 3 business days.

As always EU silently doing it right with EBSI, that aims to benefit the public sector (and ultimately the public), and hopefully the digital Euro to come.

Unfortunately distributed ledger software never seemed to get used for what it should given the crypto craze.