"My ownership data" has value. perhaps not to you. But for people i interact with.
Example :-
My education degree is something that I own. It can be very useful if I can quickly prove to the world that I indeed really have that degree. (like Twitter allows to prove you own an avatar NFT) .
It would be super helpful if this was on a blockchain instead of some university database with a cumbersome process to avail transcripts.
"As long are you are not a criminal, ownership and liquidity are not huge pain, what is the real, tangible benefit of decentralized banking?"
Capital formation for any common purpose without trusting 3rd parties.
As an example -> there are some NFT vault DAOs where strangers pool together to purchase NFTs that are too costly. People Vote on proposals regarding which NFT to acquire and when.
Ok, then show me a credible 3rd Party where I can store my ownership data apart from Government. (Most corporations which currently store my data proved that they cannot be trusted and they only look after their shareholders. Not users.)
It's difficult because blockchains have not yet scaled the infra yet. The amount of data that we can currently put on most decentralised chains is very less.
This will improve though and allow us to put a decent amount of data on the blockchain.
"This is all very simple in practice, the blockchain is barely useful, crypto coins and NFTs have very low utility"
Yes. FOR NOW. But public decentralised blockchains have interesting properties (enabling ownership , Liquidity , composability) and lots of smart people are trying to use those properties to build interesting apps.
These apps are not there yet. I am optimistic that some good apps will be launched in next few years that make use of those unique properties enabled by decentralised public blockchains.
I may be wrong but the following are what I am bullish on.
Specific Usecases are tough to predict but I can point to THE big problem to be solved by all this infra.
Every year we(younger people predominantly)spend more and more time in Digital spaces (currently they are Twitter, HN , Tiktok etc).
But we don't own anything we do in these places. One of the biggest behaviour shifts we will have in near future (esp among youngsters) is that we will start owning digital artefacts. The best places to store these are neither the government nor corporate databases but public decentralised blockchains.
Infra wise I feel Blockchains need to be modular. Wallets have to be better designed for non-tech savvy people.
The following infra changes is what I am bullish on
1) Zk rollup based chains which will hyper-specialise on certain execution workflows but end up settling data on popular blockchains. (IMX among recent launches and upcoming StarkNet launch by year end for general ZK proof rollups)
2) Wallets will be embedded inside every Web3 app and drastically reduces the friction . Example Stepn's app popularity.
Yes web3 is way too early.
Infra is still barely matured to do anything interesting.
But some nice infra projects entering production stage in few months.
I really expect some nice web3 projects in mainstream before 2024.
Web3 is just getting started.
Every new paradigm has 2 cycles often both running in parallel.
Building Cycle, where developers and enterpreneurs envision and build awesome products and necessary infrastructure.
Capital Cycle, Speculative & Growth capital goes into such projects leading to bubbles and busts.
What happened recently is Capital cycle bubble broke.
Building cycle is well and truly on.
I guess because it's almost impossible to trust an authority which also allows permissionless building on top such data.
Most corps now have proven that they act for their own shareholders and can't be trusted to look after all users.
Gov agencies while are a potential candidate for establishing trustworthy data owners are too beaurocratic to ever allow for permissionaless building on top.
Blockchains sort of allow both trust yourself (by owning private keys) & build permissionlessly on top .
Says the app is not available in your country (India)
If anyone from Vektor is seeing this, can you please add it to Indian App Store ?
India should be one of the compelling markets for such an app, 10s of millions of kids whose parents already feel math is important and ready to do all they can to provide their kids with early advantage.
You can work backwards from that, what are the problems that are in the way of achieving the vision ?
As you break down the problems into further smaller problems you might encounter a problem which is possible to tackle with the currently available resources.
One of the possible outcomes here might be identifying a team within a comp / university who is working on the same problem and then joining them. That can be the first step in the long marathon of innovation.
Would be awesome to read part-2 of this blog post -> http://www.blueraja.com/blog/477/a-better-spaced-repetition-...
Plz plz plz pen down your thoughts on reviewing(part-2 of the post) if you get some free time.