While I'll leave this thread open, I think it's sorta closed itself: the answer to my question is: there aren't any documented non-cryptocurrency design wins for blockchain.

After this question has been sitting here for over two weeks, in front of an audience that certainly ought to at least know where to look, nobody can come up with anything.

While I tried to ask this question with an open mind, this answer matches my own analysis of blockchain when I looked into the technology many years ago. My own technical background is ultra-high-scale Internet applications, although I've been in IT for over 30 years and I've done a lot of everything. My take on blockchain when I learned about it was, "that will never scale to anything within orders of magnitude of mainstream volume", and, "that won't be useful to solve any real-world problems besides cryptocurrency and NFTs".

Perhaps the error in thinking for those looking at using blockchain for their enterprise is that commercial enterprises are necessarily centralized and hence the decentralized benefit of blockchain to these entities is rather meaningless.

In other words, "centralized blockchain" is a lot like, "alcohol-free moonshine": probably not a product anybody will be interested in.

One thing people have pointed at is the preponderance of tools that major tool suppliers like Amazon, Microsoft and others quickly made available when the "blockchain" buzzword became a hot thing.

This led many, I suspect, to believe that this meant blockchain was going to be the next big thing in the enterprise. Some of us, however, have seen buzzwords like this come and go over the years, and know that at least half of the "next big things" are actually just duds--despite the multi-billion-dollar onslaught by the giant toolmakers, who can easily afford to lose everything on half of their initiatives since the other half is so profitable.

Yes, and names can be very valuable. Ask Gucci or Nike or any major sports team. Bitcoin has a brand that's worth hundreds of billions. I never said nor meant to imply that Bitcoin is "worthless".



The limited supply trait is extremely important, I agree. And yes, people see value in something that cannot inflate.



I completely agree that "legal" and "moral" are two different things, and I tried to caveat that in my post.

That said, if you are relying on cryptocurrencies to get you out of the thrall of a government that really wants to get you, you are in a precarious state regardless. An evil dictator could make using crypto a crime, and then send out thousands of honey pots all over the Internet to catch his prey, and effectively outlaw Bitcoin because people would be rightfully terrified to try using it (to take just one example off the top of my head). You might be able to stay safe if its some small government somewhere, but if its the USA, well, forget it. We're in big big trouble if it's the US government that falls to tyranny, and neither Bitcoin nor any other technology would keep anybody safe...

Look, I get that my use of the term, "meme coin" triggers people, so I'll stop using it.

I merely meant that Bitcoin's primary value was based on it's brand, which is very plain to see when you compare it to other cryptocurrencies with the exact same technical specifications as Bitcoin and yet have only a tiny fraction of Bitcoin's value.

I never claimed either of those things. Obviously Bitcoin solves a strong consumer need, which is why it has been bid up to the value it has.

I also never made any claim that institutional investors would particularly care one way or another about blockchain technology.

I did claim--and I stand by this--that the ETF and the resultant interest by consumers, and therefore the resultant interest by institutional investors, could affect the price, and I made an argument here that the result could be downward pressure on the price for the reasons I listed.


I'll take these one at a time.

First, bank bailouts. There has already been several instances of the government intervening in crypto concerns in order to protect consumers, e.g. FTX. You might say, "but you technically don't need to use an institution to invest in Bitcoin", but most consumers don't invest that way nor do they want to.

This has been my thesis here all along: most consumers do not want to hide their life savings under a mattress, or in their iPhone. They want an institutional account that is protected based on their personal identity. Hence most average consumer investors in Bitcoin and other cryptos don't pay attention to the "decentralized" mythos of Bitcoin at all and instead just see it as a meme to invest in.

If the "OG" Bitcoin community here wants to kick these people out, then do that--but guess what will happen to the price of Bitcoin et. al. when all of those consumers are kicked out? That's my thesis here.

As for inflation, both USD and BTC are investment instruments, as is gold, land, bonds, soybean futures and so on. To say that your new investment instrument "solves" inflation is circular reasoning: you are essentially promising the price of Bitcoin will go up in value compared to the value of USD, which is a promise nobody can make.

And let's get real here: no investment advisor in the world would tell somebody to put their life savings in Bitcoin--instead of, say, land--in order to hedge against the US Dollar. Bitcoin and other cryptos are speculative, volatile investment instruments which may or may not go up in value.

As for "censorship", what you are actually talking about here is allowing citizens to engage in illegal activity. I am quite sympathetic to those living under terrible governments who need protection from corruption, and I'd wish them every tool at their disposal to save themselves. But if you are saying it's really "terrible" that American citizens can't trade with Russia right now, suffice it to say that the majority of our elected representatives don't agree with you right now, and the solution is to go through the democratic process, not go against your own government.

And for what it's worth, Bitcoin is a public ledger so Bitcoin itself (as opposed to say Monero) is not a good example of that use case. Based on the difference in market cap between Bitcoin and Monero, I would surmise that most consumers don't care about that level of anonymity--they mostly want to keep their purchases from marketers, their friends and spouse, or from incompetent storefronts who would leak their personal data to criminals. That level of anonymity is given to you by Monero (or other cryptos if you engage in complicated tradecraft), but it's also given to you by non-blockchain digital currencies ala Haypenny, which is far easier for consumers to work with.

If all you had to do is move Bitcoin to AWS and it would scale to the level of a true currency, don't you think they would have tried that already? It's been over a decade now. It sure seems like this scalability problem would be solved by now if it were actually possible.

Or maybe it's a limitation of the blockchain architecture. But what do I know, I'm just a software architect with over 30 years of experience in mission-critical ultra-high-scale systems...

What country do you live in where paying in Bitcoin is illegal? Is there a list somewhere of countries like this?

I said that Bitcoin is not used as a currency, and it's not. And no, there is no country in the world where they use Bitcoin as their primary means of transactions, and even the tiniest country on Earth would be a thousand times the transaction volume of what Bitcoin sees today.

There are plenty of countries, including the USA, where Bitcoin is legal to be used as a form of payment, but you can use stock shares, or gold, or cigarettes (like they the do in prisons) in the same way.


I think of a "currency" as something that can be used for mainstream transactions e.g. to replace what the US dollar or other sovereign currencies do. Bitcoin can't do that.

And you are right, DOGE or SHIB can't do that either. In fact, nothing based on the blockchain architecture can scale to the level of being a real, mainstream currency.

Bitcoin is based on the same general architecture as DOGE and SHIB, the only real difference being that Bitcoin is a more popular brand name (meme, if you will) than those others.


The poster had said that Bitcoin was the only decentralized cryptocurrency. This is false. I was trying to be nice :-).

Yes, but here's the thing: these are the people Bitcoin needs in order to be accepted as a mainstream investment option. This is the whole point of my OP. You can deride the "dumb dumbs" all you want, but if you scare their money away, the price of Bitcoin will likely go down.

In other words, if most people's first impression of Bitcoin is that you have to believe in a bunch of technical concepts that don't apply to their everyday lives in any way in order to see the value, then that's going to leave them with a negative impression.


Well, if you ask most mainstream people, I think it would be the exact opposite: they don't want their entire life savings held in some iPhone they could accidentally drop into a landfill. They like the idea that their life savings is secured in a financial institution that is based on their identity as a person.

Most people only keep a tiny faction of their total wealth in their physical wallet on their own person.


I am talking here of using blockchain as a technology architecture to solve real problems, e.g. the way technologies like RDBMS's solve problems, or cloud computing solves problems, or other new architectures solve problems.

And the point about the Fed inflating the US dollar is circular reasoning: you are saying that Bitcoin will outperform the US dollar because... Bitcoin will outperform the US dollar. Maybe it will, or maybe it won't. Maybe it will lose half of its value in the next six months (like it did 24 months ago for instance), and maybe it will double in price. But in that context, bringing up the inflation of the US dollar--which peaked at something like 10% annually in the worst part of the pandemic recovery--seems pretty paltry in comparison.

And absolutely any investment instrument from stocks to bonds to pork bellies can be used to hedge against the US dollar, so Bitcoin is not exactly unique in that regard.

Yes, that's true. But lots of technologies were made for one reason only to be used for another reason.

Bitcoin is simply not viable as a mainstream means of payment. There's no chance it can scale to even 1/10,000 of the price-performance necessary to take on worldwide credit card volume for instance.

Today, in actual fact, Bitcoin is used mostly as an investment asset, and it offers no advantages over other technologies for any other purpose.

I know a lot of smart people, thank you very much.

The fact is that if these "stupid" people you are talking about--the ones who don't hold their private keys in their own physical possession--all dumped their Bitcoin holdings, then the price of Bitcoin would plummet.

You seem to want it both ways: you want the "stupid" people to buy positions in the meme that is "Bitcoin" so the value of your holdings will go up, but you don't consider them "real" unless they are experts like yourself, which almost none of them are.

And for the record, I've asked for hard, documented, non-cryptocurrency design wins for the blockchain architecture, and nobody either here on Bitcointalk nor anywhere else can show me one. My own 30+ years of experience in computer architecture tells me that the technology has no other viable uses because it will never scale and doesn't solve any real-world problems, but I'm willing to be proven wrong. So far I haven't been.

I know the original reasons behind Bitcoin's creation, but nobody uses Bitcoin that way nor will they. Bitcoin is far too slow and expensive to be a viable means of mainstream transactions. It couldn't handle even 1% of the world's current credit card transactions, let alone multiples of it as you would need to truly make it a replacement for today's worldwide transaction load.

And if Bitcoin isn't "the future of money", then it's just a meme. There's nothing wrong with that! Bitcoin is a powerful meme with a lot behind it, and lots of people know about the name, so they will invest in it.

And Bitcoin is the only decentralized crypto? So other cryptos like Ethereum and all of the others are "centralized"? Are you sure about that?

Um, you understand that if Bitcoin is "left alone" by investors, it goes... down in price, not up, right? 

In a sense, you just made my point for me: that the ETF will introduce Bitcoin to millions of mainstream investors, who will just view it as another instrument whose job is solely to go up in price, and they aren't going to find any meaning behind it when except that it is not any more "private" or "decentralized" than any other ETF they buy from their licensed brokerage.

And I don't know how much more I can say to "prove" that Bitcoin is not effectively decentralized for almost all of its users except to say that nobody I've ever known personally who has invested in Bitcoin or other cryptos actually physically hold their own private keys. They all use it through some app or brokerage like CoinBase, which means it's no different than their bank account.

Put it this way, if everybody who currently holds positions in Bitcoin and don't physically hold their private keys "left it alone"--in other words, sold their positions--then the price of Bitcoin would probably drop by a factor of about a thousand...

Bitcoin is just a meme, and there are a lot of memes out there. Technically speaking, Bitcoin is roughly the same as all of the other cryptocurrencies, and vastly inferior to Haypenny currencies which is a digital currency platform that can actually scale to handle the world's daily transactions, e.g. millions of transactions per second and tens of billions per day.

Brands/memes come and go. The "Bitcoin" brand might be hot now and for the next few years, but it can fall by the wayside in the same way other brands have like Jordache and Members Only--or maybe it will endure like Polo or Izod. We'll see.

But one thing is for sure, there will be lots of other brands out there in the future that will become red-hot and they will give investors opportunities for massive gains...

The answer is "yes", but... why would you? Paying for something with Bitcoin is just like paying for something with your TSLA or MSFT shares. You can technically do it, but why would you? Bitcoin might be a good investment, but it's turned out to be very poor for transactions, as they are extremely slow and extremely expensive compared to the available alternatives.

So don't pay for things with Bitcoin directly, just convert some of your BTC to USD (or whatever sovereign currency) and perform the transaction the way you normally would. There's no advantage to paying directly with Bitcoin (assuming the payee even takes it), and lots of disadvantages.

Although it didn't start out this way, today Bitcoin is in all practicality an investment instrument, not a currency.

My own theory is that this will be bad for Bitcoin in the long run since the "mythos" behind Bitcoin ("decentralized", etc.) is utterly mocked by the ETF, and thus mainstream investors will ignore it, and look at Bitcoin and cryptos as pure meme investments and nothing else.

In other words, buying Bitcoin will be not too different that buying stock in GameStop: you buy it because you think others are going to be buying it, which will make the price go up.

If Bitcoin isn't a "revolution" and is instead just a meme, then it will play equally along side all of thousands of other meme investments, which is bound to bring the price down as it will see more competition.

Of course the ETF could increase Bitcoin's meme as well, driving the price up. So I guess we'll see.

Yes, if you take precautions you can be safe for some purchases, but if buy, say, a house or a car, which necessarily has your name on it, then people can trace backwards to find you, and then extrapolate other purchases etc.

For GMail, on the hand, you don't have to be careful, you just use it and nobody without a court order is going to be reading your email.

And yeah, I guess if we're talking about one's spouse, that's probably correct, but if we're talking about malign actors e.g. people looking to steal something from you, spending without taking precautions with Bitcoin can get you ripped off, whereas you can email your brains out with GMail and never have to fear such a thing.

For the average user not accustomed to tradecraft, a centralized app from a reputable company is a better bet than Bitcoin or most other cryptos (obviously not the ones specially designed for anonymity like Monero).

And for most people who are not criminals, the kind of anonymity you get from centralized apps is perfectly fine.

Of course if we're talking about credit card purchases (or PayPal et. al.) then it's is a totally different story. Your purchases are practically announced to the whole world with that because they sell non-anonymized marketing data to whomever wants to buy it.

What somebody needs to do is marry these two concepts wherein you can make payments anonymously with a centralized digital currency architecture that doesn't sell your data (and doesn't even know who you are), allowing average consumers to make anonymous payments and yet not be a security threat by allowing criminals a means of extra-legal payment. 

But all ETFs are necessarily centralized, so what could "decentralized" possibly mean in the context of somebody buying shares of an ETF?

Sure, but assets to hedge against currency losses have been around for hundreds of years (commodities, metals, real estate, equities, etc. etc.).

This is exactly what I was trying to say in the OP: now that Bitcoin is "just another investment", it's going to be evaluated along side all of the others, and it's going to need a story about why it's uniquely positioned to outperform other investment instruments that do the same thing. If Bitcoin doesn't do that, it's going to take on a bad reputation.

Most consumers don't have any practical way of getting at their private key (if there even is one associated with their account), and the entire point of decentralization is lost. This is like saying you can melt down your GOLD ETF and make some jewelry.

But I never said that Bitcoin has no purpose, only that much of its original vision did not pan out. Clearly Bitcoin serves a purpose, and investors agree.


If somebody within Google read people's email, they would be prosecuted (talking here about reading it in the way that most would care, e.g. your specific emails to get at your own personal messages for a specific purpose). Put it this way, for all practical purposes, if you are not breaking the law, your GMail is more private than your Bitcoin transactions. If you send an email with GMail that you don't want your spouse to know about, you are safe, for instance. With Bitcoin that is a lot harder, and far out of reach for most consumers.

I can almost guarantee that nearly all Institutional investors... don't know what a private key is, nor would they want to.

Bitcoin's goal of creating a decentralized financial system... failed. It doesn't do that in any mainstream way. In actual reality, it's mostly just a meme investment.