Scaling and transaction cost have been solved using ZK-rollups. Transactions cost less than a cent and take less than a second. 2000 transactions per second throughput. A lot has changed in the last 2 years.
Ethereum is scalable already. Layer 2 solutions like https://zksync.io/ and https://loopring.org/#/ are already live and allow 2000 transactions per second. This is based on ZK-rollups and provides the same level of security as the base layer. This technology can be used for trades or transfers.
Another exciting technology that is coming this year is optimistic rollups, which will provide the same level of scalability for arbitrary smart contracts.
Layer 1 is expensive. There are other really cool projects that get the same level of security as layer 1, but are much faster and cheaper. For example https://zksync.io/ allows payments that take less than a second and cost less than 1 cent. It’s based on zero knowledge cryptography.
Someone should build a way for people to pay 10 cents per article to read the New York Times without registering using this technology and a stable coin.
There were no ICOs in the last 2 years. The community moved on from that. Decentralized non custodial exchange usage is growing, like https://loopring.org/ that’s based on zero knowledge proofs cryptography and allows 2000 trades per second, and the people who built it can’t steal your money even if they wanted to.
Why do people instantly jump to the extreme negative? Any technology can be used for to do bad things. The community is aware of this possibility and have taken precautions. Also any financial market can also be viewed as an assassination market. You can short a stock and assassinate the CEO and profit, but people don’t actually do that in practice. Also, Augur v1 (V2 is coming out this month) has existed for about 2 years and there were no assassination markets on it. The community would resolve them as “invalid”, so it’a not possible to guarantee profit unlike in the regular stock market.
Decentralized prediction markets also offer global liquidity, so the counterparty can be located anywhere on earth. Also the friction and fees should be much lower. If someone in Mongolia wants to bet a million dollars against someone in Colombia today, it’s extremely hard to do without a blockchain (think about the fees and time to wire the money, who would you be wiring it to, etc). Prediction markets are not just for gambling, by the way. They could be used for earthquake insurance, for example.
A perfect killer example is globally accessible prediction markets. They always get shut down by governments. Isn’t it crazy that you currently can’t place a bet on a horse race or a presidential election in the US?
Making it hard to change the rules is one of the value propositions of decentralized blockchains. Hard forks are pretty rare and when do happen, they are contentious the original chain survives (for example Ethereum Classic).
Compare this to a centralized entity like Blizzard changing rules in World of Warcraft. Wouldn't you agree that it's much much easier for Blizzard to change the rules in their game, than to change the rules of a blockchain by hard forking?
Game items like weapons and shields in an RPG game. Imagine if there is a global database of such items and different game developers build different games around it. So you could use your items in different games.
What centralized entity would you trust to run and maintain this database? What if this centralied goes bankrupt and shuts down the servers? If you are a small game developer, you are screwed. Even if it's Google, you still can't be certain that Google will not shut down the project and turn off the database like it has with certain projects in the past.
A public open blockchain is a neutral database that it would be reasonable for many small game developers to use for this purpose without fearing that it will get shut down, or the rules would be changed.