Thank you very much for your complete answer.

You listed a bunch of areas that others have listed as well when I asked this question elsewhere. These are definitely "candidates" for blockchain solutions.

But "candidates" are just that: candidates. It doesn't mean anything unless you win the design.

And so far there are no known winners that anybody seems to be able to point to.

And understand that simply saying, "I built this solution using xyz technology" doesn't tell you anything. As the old saying goes, "when your problem is a nail, every tool is a hammer". One "could" write the next version of Grand Theft Auto in Perl, and with enough money behind it from tools makers, it is theoretically possible but... so what? You could have done it some other way faster and cheaper and better.

I've been around the tech industry a long time, and I've seen new buzzwords come and go. The ones that stick around always have an answer to this question.

And none have ever taken anywhere near this long.

I continue to be inclined to believe that blockchain will never be used outside of the realm of NFTs and cryptocurrencies--but I'm open to be proven wrong.

Um, I've used Bitcoin. Many times. It didn't make me feel any different .

I can certainly see where Bitcoin will have niches e.g. countries where the government is corrupt and unstable, and I should have qualified my comment above.

However, as it's mainstream appeal, Bitcoin is an investment, and it's an investment in a "name", not an investment based on it's practical use (there are thousands of other cryptocurrencies that do what Bitcoin does for your country, and now pure digital currencies that will serve as a means of value transfer far better than Bitcoin or any blockchain-based currency).

Until the basic laws of physics are repealed, there will be no way a decentralized infrastructure will scale to the level needed to truly take on the world-wide credit card infrastructure (which is just a start in taking over currency generally).

And even centralized cryptocurrencies using blockchain are too slow and expensive to scale to this level. XRP touts aspirational numbers of "a thousand transactions a second" when a real competitor would need to be several million transactions a second. There's simply no way you can do this with blockchain, and you'd instead need to use a non-blockchain paradigm like Haypenny.

Blockchain is a great platform for meme investments like Bitcoin or NFTs, but it's not suitable as a real, mainstream currency and never will be.

Good luck with your project!

And yet almost everybody who uses Bitcoin uses it with some sort of app or bank or institution that means your asset is in the same boat as keeping your money in an ordinary bank--except that the systems your wealth is stored in was invented 18 months ago and not 40 years ago, so it's probably got a lot more bugs.

How many Bitcoin investors do you know who keep their private keep in their own person? Seriously?

People aren't buying water bottles with Bitcoin in El Salvador or anyplace else. You don't need a government to buy up a bunch of it like they did in order to make Bitcoin mainstream, you need to make it perform comparable to credit card transactions at a comparable price, which Bitcoin is at least 1000x from being.

Everybody knows the name "Bitcoin" and it's a meme worth over one half trillion dollars. What more do you want?

15 years is a eons for... technology. And Bitcoin has traveled further from it's goals of being a decentralized currency in that time, not closer.

The ETF in particular makes a mockery of the original goals of Bitcoin.

Bitcoin is a meme investment instrument, not a viable means of mainstream transactions. There's nothing wrong with that, but you might as well get used to calling it what it really is...

And yet today, most (almost all?) Bitcoin transactions are done using some intermediary like a bank, an app, or other financial institution.

Bitcoin today, in actual reality, is mostly a meme investment, not a means of payment or value transfer.

And after over a decade of trying and billions of dollars thrown at the problem, I think it's time to throw in the towel and just get used to Bitcoin and cryptos generally to be limited to the (very very large) business of meme investments. This is the way most people use Bitcoin today, and it's just fine.

I've posed this question before in the "unserious" sections here, and posed it in a couple of other places on the Internet as well and thus far I have pointedly not received an answer so I'll post here.

The question is, what is an example of an IT design win for blockchain technology that is not associated with cryptocurrency or NFTs.

I am looking for specific examples, not handwaving "people in the xyz industry love blockchain" or "CEO xyz says they want to build stuff with blockchain", and I am looking for end-user solutions and not tools e.g. what Amazon, Microsoft et. al. offer to developers in order to produce a real-world solution.

Ideally, I'd like to see something written up with an ROI analysis, and demonstrate why implementing blockchain made the project better/faster/cheaper/etc. versus doing the project without blockchain.

I'm going to try to be a bit provocative here and ask, pointedly:

Why hasn't anybody been able to answer this?

I'm on my way to concluding that... there is no such design win, which means blockchain is... only useful for cryptocurrencies and NFTs and nothing else.

But I could be wrong. My search for evidence continues...

I can see how important it is for people to believe in all of these conspiracy theories now. All one has to do is say they believe, and they can justify absolutely anything.

This way you can choose to believe the FBI and the courts etc. when it aligns with your political goals, and deny hard evidence when they don't. Very effective, I must say.

So only Epstein is (was) guilty of anything? Good to know. I guess we can put the "list" in the OP to bed then, eh?

The event was probably priced in weeks ago by investors. Welcome to the stock market .

What are the names of the people who should be prosecuted in the Epstein orbit? Under what charges should they be charged? What specific evidence gives rise to each of these charges?

If you were actually concerned about all of those things you mentioned before, then it sure seems like you'd be trying to learn the answers to those questions.

It's good for Bitcoin ETF adoption, but this just made it so nobody needs to hold actual Bitcoin anymore to profit from its gain in price. Anybody with an ordinary brokerage account can bet on Bitcoin now, so why would anybody mess around with a complicated, risky "wallet app" or a relatively new financial firm like Binance?

The reality is that Bitcoin (and cryptos generally) have been meme investments* since their inception for almost all consumers.

(*I don't mean this term in some kind of negative way--I'm open to other phraseology if anybody wants to offer it).

Exactly. If anything, the ETF will make it so that fewer people will own actual Bitcoin since they no longer have to in order to profit from it's increase in price.

And if Bitcoin is not a tangible company or other tangible asset, and it's not any of the things it was originally touted to be e.g. a superior means of payment, then... what else is it? People buying this ETF are buying the word "Bitcoin" and nothing else...

Not implying anything of the sort. Bitcoin is a pure meme to invest in. There is nothing wrong with that. Whether it's the next Gamestop or the next Amazon is up to investors.

And yes, Bitcoin is going to see more adoption as a meme investment because of the ETF. It's not going to change whether people use it for other reasons e.g. paying for stuff at the retail level.

But an ETF makes a mockery of all of the old-school allegedly useful features of Bitcoin e.g. "decentralized" and so forth...

This cements Bitcoin's place as a pure meme investment connected to absolutely nothing tangible. It's awesome!

This is a classic case of a technology that was invented to solve one problem, but solved a completely different one even though it was a failure at what it set out to do originally. You can't get any further from Bitcoin's original vision than an ETF traded through a highly regulated stock broker with strong KYC rules and tax forms built right in .

Excellent. Bitcoin is now officially a meme investment that has nothing to do with its original ideals .

Everybody is worried about those things. Obviously.

But without evidence, there's nothing anybody can do. In other words, what is that "something" that you want done? Should somebody be brought up on charges? If so, who? On what charges? With what evidence?

You see, this is why you can't only go by conspiracy theory sites. In the real world, you can't send somebody to prison based on what somebody said on a podcast.

I don't doubt there are a small number of people in the world using cryptos to pay for things "on a daily basis" but the keyword here is small. There are something like 30 billion transactions a day worldwide using credit cards alone, and there's simply no chance, architecturally, that cryptocurrency could even achieve one thousandth of that.

And as I've said many, many (many!  ) times here, I think it's great that people view Bitcoin as an investment opportunity. You have my viewpoint here exactly backwards. I think cryptos are a perfectly fine investment instrument and they've shown their popularity in being so in the last 10 years.

But as a worldwide payment system, crypto has failed. And you know what? Given the price of Bitcoin right now, nobody cares. How hard is it to believe that a technology that was created for one purpose was instead used for another purpose, the original one being a bust? That's happened a zillion times in the history of tech...




Sorry that I think what? I said I agree that Google has privacy issues, and they are well-documented. And my company doesn't even use cookies because we see them as evil.

I was only making a narrow point about the text and meaning of the emails themselves, for which there has never been any evidence that Google has every breached that without a specifically targeted court order, nor would there be any reason for them to. That doesn't mean I deny they have many privacy issues, many of which I've seen first hand in my IT career.