Decentralized apps and orgs, great cryptocurrency, bitcoin, ethereum, block chain explainer with some honesty about whether all this tech and infra is actually useful
Pontifications
- Great “decentralized apps and organizations via bitcoin, ethereum, block chain, etc” explainer with some honesty about whether all this tech and infra is actually useful: A Letter to Jamie Dimon And anyone else still struggling to understand cryptocurrencies
Juicy quotes and of course read the whole thing:
Decentralized applications are a new form of organization and a new form of software. They’re a new model for creating, financing, and operating software services in a way that is decentralized top-to-bottom. That doesn’t make them better or worse than existing software models or the corporate entities that create them. As we’ll see later, there are major trade-offs. What we can say is simply that they are radically different from software as we know it today and radically different from the forms of organization we are used to.
How different? Imagine the following: you grew up in a rainforest and I brought you a cactus and told you it was a tree. How would you react? You’d probably laugh and say it’s not a tree because there’s no point in a tree being a stumpy water tank covered in armor — after all, water is abundant here in the rainforest! This, roughly, is the reaction of many people working in Silicon Valley to decentralized applications.
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In general, a decentralized application allows you to do something you can already do today (like payments) but without a trusted central party.
Bottom line: centralized applications beat the pants off decentralized applications on virtually every dimension.
EXCEPT FOR ONE DIMENSION.
And not only are decentralized applications better at this one thing, they are the only way we can achieve it.
What am I referring to?
Censorship resistance.